Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture 9780231507462

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Equal Rites

religion and american culture

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  An Early American Royal Arch Templar Diploma Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, ), :a.

The Religion and American Culture series explores the interaction between religion and culture throughout American history. Titles examine such issues as how religion functions in particular urban contexts, how it interacts with popular culture, its role in social and political conflicts, and its impact on regional identity. Series Editor Randall Balmer is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion and former chair of the Department of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University.  . , Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalsim in Postwar America  , Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier  .  , Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society  , O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs

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Equal Rites THE BOOK OF MORMON, MASONRY, GENDER, AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Clyde Jr. Clyde R. R. Forsberg, Forsberg Jr.

    

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Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex © 2004 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Forsberg, Clyde R. Equal rites : The Book of Mormon, Masonry, gender, and American culture / Clyde R. Forsberg, Jr. p. cm. — (Religion and American culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-12640-9 (alk. paper) 1. Mormon Church—Doctrines—History—19th century. 2. Freemasonry— Religious aspects—Mormon Church—History—19th century. 3. Women—Religious aspects—Mormon Church—History of doctrines—19th century. 4. Book of Mormon— Criticism, interpretation, etc. 5. United States—Church history—19th century. I. Title. II. Religion and American culture (New York, N.Y.) BX8611 .F65 2002 289.3—dc21 2002073881 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For my mother, who loved “the mysteries of the Gospel” more than life itself

  Prostyle Temple Memorializing De Witt Clinton Jeremy Cross, The True Masonic Chart (1819), reproduced in Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 144.

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Motto of Royal Arch Masonry: “Holiness to the Lord” A goal of Freemasonry, as expressed by Widows’s Sons’ Lodge No. 60, Charlottesville, Virginia, for two hundred years: “To make good men, better men” A goal of Mormonism, according to LDS president Brigham Young: “It will make a bad man good, and a good man better” Inscription on Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City: “Holiness to the Lord”

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The people will always mock at things easy to be misunderstood; it must needs have impostures. A Spirit that loves wisdom and contemplates the Truth close at hand, is forced to disguise it, to induce the multitudes to accept it. . . . Fictions are necessary to a people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance. . . . The truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason. —Synesius, bishop of Ptolemais, cabalist and inspiration to Christian Masons So Masonry jealously conceals its secrets, and intentionally leads conceited interpreters astray. There is no sight under the sun more pitiful and ludicrous at once, than the spectacle of the Prestons and the Webbs. —Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Brother Brigham, if I were to reveal to this people what the Lord has revealed to me, there is not a man or woman that would stay with me. —Joseph Smith Jr. What is spoken in a prayer Circle should never be Named out of the Circle not [to] a wife or any body Els [sic]. If there is any thing to be said I will say it. I Could preach all about the Endowments in Public and the world know Nothing about it. I Could preach all about Masonry & None but a mason know any thing about it. And the mane [sic] part of Masonry is to keep a secret. . . . Now Brother L. N. Scovill thinks so much of masonery [sic] that he might Join in with them. G. A. Smith Said He does not wish to mix hair and wool but he would like to Go to England & obtain five Charters for lodges which would give us a grand lodge which would make us independent of all other Grand lodges in the world. This is what Brother Scovill would like to do and this Could be done but I do not think he would be willing to mingle with our Enemies to the injury of this people. —Wilford Woodruff, LDS president

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contents

Preface: Mormon Masonry? xiii Acknowledgments xxiii

Introduction: The Wax and Wane of Masonry in American Culture 

I

THE MORMON-MASONIC NEXUS

one Reading a Sealed Book  two Was Joseph Smith a Mason?  three Dreaming Masonry: Getting the Story Plumb  four As the Words of a Book That Is Sealed: The Book of Mormon as Esoteric Male (Hi)Story  five Fleeing Babel with Mother and Child in Tow 

II

THE QUEST WITHIN THE QUEST

six A Bible! A Bible! We Have Got a Bible  seven The Search for the Long Lost Book in the Book of Mormon  eight What Manner of (Masonic) Men? 

III

THE ANTI-EVANGELICAL MIND OF JOSEPH SMITH JR.

nine Whether a Man Can Enter a Second Time into His Mother’s Womb 

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ten Heaven and Hell: Divining the Ghost of Emmanuel Swedenborg 

eleven Father-Son and Holy Ghost–Mother? The Mormon-God Question 

IV

THE MILLENNIAL, RACIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL CONFEDERACY

twelve Thy Kingdom Come: On Earth As It Is in Heaven  thirteen Mormons and Jews  fourteen The Curse and Redemption of the Lamanites: Salvation Bi-race Alone 

fifteen The Economic Kingdom of God: Masonic Utopianism Unveiled 

Postscript: The “Americanness” of Mormonism 

Notes  Bibliography  Index 

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preface: mormon masonry?

It is clearly evident to anyone who acquaints himself with th[e Mormon] creed that there are no conflicts between the teachings, theology, and dogma of Mormonism and the philosophy and tenets of universal Freemasonry. . . . It must be readily acknowledged that Mormonism and Freemasonry are so intimately and inextricably interwoven and interrelated that the two can never be dissociated. —Brother Marvin B. Hogan, Mormonism and Freemasonry

    , I defended my doctoral dissertation on the Book of Mormon and American culture only a month or two before John Brooke’s award-winning The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 arrived at bookstores and university libraries.1 In hindsight, it was a good thing it came out after my defense, or I might not have graduated until now. Jan Shipps (the external on my committee) was no doubt right to suggest that perhaps I should have availed myself of a manuscript copy of Refiner’s Fire before coming forward with a final draft that seemed to come straight out of it, apparently focusing on early Mormonism as a defense of pristine Masonry.2 In truth, it was a primitive Masonic argument that I brought to the committee in 1994. That said, Masonry was more of a sidebar, the issue of an alleged Mormon-Evangelical nexus—which I hotly dispute—the focus. Having decided against that commanding interpretation of early Mormonism as coming out of Evangelical America rather than coming out against it (no small feat), I would be in a position to turn my attention to Masonry and thus render a final verdict. A direct result of the expert guidance at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels under Roman Catholic philosopher of religion Hugo A. Meynell and American cultural historian Klaus J. Hansen, my postdoctoral foray into the fascinating world of American fraternalism has not forced me to contradict my earlier findings for the Book of Mormon as a dialectical synthesis and early Mormonism as an anti-Evangelical movement. In some important respects, looking at Mormonism through the Book of Mormon

A

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and with two eyes (Evangelicalism and Masonry), not one, a stereoscopic view is the hope. The idea that the Mormon prophet borrowed heavily from Freemasonry is not new.3 But for the most part scholars have suggested that these were innovations introduced into Mormonism at the end of Smith’s career—innovations that led to a number of dramatic departures from an earlier Mormonism codified in the Book of Mormon (from which the religion derived its name). It was these later innovations, in fact, that sparked controversy within the movement, ending in the martyrdom of Joseph and his brother Hyrum. A major schism ensued—Latter-day Saints versus Reorganized Latter Day Saints—with the RLDS holding fast to what they regard as the original, authentic Mormonism as contained in the Book of Mormon and Smith’s earlier revelations, while the LDS under Brigham Young accepted the (Masonic) innovations as Smith’s more mature thinking on the nature and origin of the priesthood, which had been lost and restored to the earth through him. That similarities exist between the LDS temple and the Masonic temple does not bode well for American Masonry, the bastard child in the whole affair, so the Mormon argument goes.4 Mormonism rose like a phoenix out of the ashes of the “burned-over district,” to be sure.5 Evangelical preaching played a role in the emergence of the church that Smith organized in April 1830. Whether he intended to remove himself and his followers so completely from the Christian tradition in the beginning is the question, of course. By the time Young relocated the church beyond the territorial United States to the shores of the Great Salt Lake to begin construction of a new capital city and establish the Kingdom of God in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, Mormonism had moved decidedly outside the pale of American Christianity—for a time, that is, until the Great Republic extended its reach into the Mexican desert (from sea to shining sea). And if the Latter-day Saints had hopes of reenacting the flight for refuge of ancient Israel, their story and their fate resemble that of the armies of Pharaoh: a deep blue sea of liberal democracy crashed down all around them, to their utter shock and dismay. Mormonism owes its existence, however, not simply to the overwhelmingly female world of the Second Great Awakening (in both a positive and a negative sense, I might add) but also to the equally pervasive yet exclusively male world of Freemasonry. The latter, it seems, was both a positive and negative influence on the young Smith, too. It is hardly a coincidence that the future prophet envisioned the need for a pristine order of holy priesthood to offset the debilitating effects of widespread apostasy—beginning work on a book of scrip-

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ture to that effect—about the same time (1826–1827) that New York Masons allegedly kidnapped and then executed Captain William Morgan. Morgan had fallen out of favor and let slip a plan to publish a transcription of the Masonic ritual in toto (including the Grand Omnific Word). He paid dearly for this transgression. Not only was Morgan’s book a flagrant disregard of his Masonic oath of secrecy, but it threatened to “expose” Masonry to the general public for mere pennies on the dollar. Probably because Morgan seemed only interested in making money at Masonry’s expense, a select group of New York Masons took the extraordinary (and indeed rather un-Masonic) step of executing him for threatening to break the vow of silence. The badly decomposed body of Timothy Monroe (his death a coincidence) washed up on the shores of Lake Ontario, but Morgan’s remains were never recovered. New York Masonry held to the story that Morgan had been paid to leave the region and never return. The Mormon prophet’s most controversial biographer, Fawn M. Brodie, thought that “Joseph Smith combined the first syllables of Morgan and Monroe to coin the name Mormon.”6 Brodie, however, assumed that Smith added fuel to the fire. Had Evangelicals bothered to read the Book of Mormon, they could not have been more pleased by its attacks against secret societies as the handiwork of the devil. The Mormon prophet flip-flopped, then, when he became a Master Mason in March 1842, in Nauvoo, Illinois, where a “new” social and religious doctrine would come to fruition. Whether it was purely pragmatic, intended to keep the wolf of mobocracy at bay, a clever attempt to curry political support to make his dreams of empire a reality, or all of these surely begs the question.7 Gone was the Evangelicalism of his youth. Deciding whether early Mormonism abandoned its original Protestant vision depends entirely on how one interprets the Book of Mormon, and should it prove amenable to a pro-Masonic interpretation, then this is likely to change nearly everything we have come to assume about the Mormon prophet and his milieu. Did the Mormon prophet’s leadership style not take a turn for the worse by the 1840s, proving the republican axiom that power tends to corrupt, absolute power, absolutely? Admittedly, Nauvoo took on the appearance of an Islamic theocracy, a veritable nation-state with its own private army (though it had a charter from the Illinois State Legislature). There was a little too much military pomp and saber rattling for everyone’s good, suggesting that Smith came to view himself as more of a Napoleon Bonaparte than a George Washington. When a local anti-Mormon newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, attempted to

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publish an exposé on his latest departure from the Book of Mormon and Christian faith—polygamous union—Smith had the press scattered by decree of the Nauvoo City Council. It was not only the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. He was crowned (for God’s sake!) by a Council of Fifty (a political subset of the faith) as “King of the Kingdom of God and His Laws.” Was this not a violation of the Constitution and the democratic freedoms for which Americans had fought? In fact, Smith’s alleged un-American activities in Nauvoo (which cost him his life) can perhaps be seen as extreme instances of the exercise of Masonic political power, more or less in keeping with the original republican or patriarchal vision of the founding fathers. That the governor of New York, De Witt Clinton, was coronated in a secret (Masonic) ceremony, too; that Americans at the time were simply mad for medievalism; that it was not uncommon for most “democratic” elections to be decided behind lodge doors, as I will show, and in plenty of time to guarantee a particular outcome; that all of it was utterly democratic for all but the Evangelical minority suggests that in some important respects republicanism would not become democratic until the Civil War decided the matter in favor of a Northern, Evangelical middle-class vision for the future. In truth, America had more self-anointed “kings” at the state and federal level by the 1820s than one would think. This would all change rather dramatically following the Morgan affair as Masonry became for a time a political liability rather than a given. And so whether the Mormon prophet should be seen as a threat to the American way depends entirely on whether the American way was a threat to itself—in short, on whether one ought to take with a grain of salt the history of the Great Republic as imparted by a decidedly victorious Protestantism. That the story of America seems to credit only Evangelicalism and thus the Great Awakenings for the country’s coming of age is no less problematic or one-sided.8 Carol Berkin, Christopher Miller, Robert Cherny, and James Gormy, in their massive Making America, accuse Masons of influence peddling and thus of being rather un-American.9 Other textbook histories tend to be selective as well.10 Gordon S. Wood admits that the Republican and Masonic traditions embodied the Revolutionary ideals of sociability and cosmopolitanism, that “for thousands of Americans [Masonry] was a major means by which they participated directly in the Enlightenment.” He even points out that Masons set themselves apart from Evangelicals because their latent sectarianism seemed to run counter to a host of democratic ideals. “It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of American Masonry for the American Revolu-

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tion,” Wood writes but does not elucidate further.11 J. M. Roberts, in his book The Mythology of the Secret Societies, suggests that “one reason why historians have tended to neglect secret societies is, paradoxically, the very strength of the mythology which grew up around them.”12 The considerable spadework of a group of neofeminist social and cultural historians has begun the important job of correcting this oversight, advancing the discussion of Freemasonry and other secret societies in important ways. Mark C. Carnes, Steven C. Bullock, Scott Abbott, Douglas Smith, Mary Ann Clawson, Lynn Dumenil, and Dorothy Ann Lipson and Paul Goodman are among its pioneers.13 Ironically, Mormonism is barely mentioned. In Carnes’s Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, for example, Smith is credited with perceiving “better than anyone else . . . that fraternal initiation could serve as a substitute for religious conversion.”14 And yet he does not include Mormonism in his list of American fraternities around the turn of the century, despite a membership around 250,000 and growing (pp. 6–7). Clawson’s Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism ignores Mormonism completely; so, too, do Bullock’s Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order and Dumenil’s Freemasonry and American Culture.15 Only Michael Homer, Harold Bloom, and John Brooke address Mormonism as a full-fledged member of the fraternal/hermetic tradition in any detail and as a contender in the battle for male (and female) allegiance.16 As far as women and Masonry went, Smith’s Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia suggests that continental Masonry gravitated toward the Scottish Rite because, among other things, it included women—albeit aristocratic wives and daughters of Master Masons—with the result that European lodges took on a quasi-feminist appearance.17 Evangelicalism, Mormonism, and Masonry each had a stake in the so-called gender revolution, with early Mormonism in effect occupying the middle ground between (Evangelical) feminism and (Masonic) patriarchy. From the point of view of the burgeoning Evangelical feminism that was gaining momentum as a consequence of the Second Great Awakening, Mormonism was likely to appear to be intractable in its defense of patriarchal values. However, from the vantage point of the Masonic standing order, it seemed perhaps much too amenable to the feminist agenda.18 Mormonism gives fathers veto power at home and in church, yet it also enjoins women to attend the lodge (or temple) as equal and active participants in all the secret rituals of manhood. The plan was far more daring than merely accommodating women—giving wives of Mormon males a lodge and ritual of their own tailored to the specific needs of the weaker

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sex—it conferred a degree of (ritual) equality that the Masonic mainstream in America at least has yet to make any serious attempts to implement to this day.19 Ironically, feminist critics of the LDS temple (insiders in particular) have not been as careful to note that, while Mormonism is clearly paternalistic (until recently women were required to make an oath to obey their husbands, for example), men and women play an equal role in the ceremony. In fact, the role played by Mormon feminists in the decision to remove blood oaths from the LDS temple ritual, in the hopes that more women (like them) might attend, only confirms the orthodox Masonic argument for the exclusion of women. As one Masonic source diplomatically explains: Woman is not permitted to participate in our rites and ceremonies, not because we deem her unworthy or unfaithful, or incapable, as has been foolishly supposed, of keeping a secret, but because on our entrance into the Order, we found certain regulations which prescribed that only men capable of enduring the labor, or of fulfilling the duties of Operative Masons, could be admitted. These regulations we have solemnly promised never to alter; nor could they have changed, without an entire disorganization of the whole system of Speculative Freemasonry. (2:1113)

That the original ceremony made no attempts to shield its female candidates from the gore of manhood suggests that early Mormonism held women in much higher esteem (in the ritual sense, that is) than some in the feminist quarter do now. In some respects, the current feminization of Mormonism could be seen as a giant leap backward. The Book of Mormon may have been intended for a younger generation of Masons or Masonic hopefuls who longed for greater gender equality at the Lodge in the face of increasing pressure from the Evangelical quarter to give women greater power over the home and access to the public sphere. The male world of Masonry offered no such degree of playful and ritualized malefemale interaction and celebration. And so Smith chose to break with Masonic orthodoxy and attempt to find a way to add women to the male (ritual) roster.20 Early Mormonism had a strong appeal to women. In fact, slightly more women than men joined—perhaps in part because, in an important sense, this equal access to the hitherto secret world of manhood (the male private sphere) was empowering. If one cares to investigate it more deeply, the chasm separating patriarchy and feminism some two centuries ago may not have been as deep or wide as many like to believe.

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Clearly, the stereotype of the nineteenth-century Mormon woman as slave to husband and church is more fiction than fact. Fanny Stenhouse’s scathing account of life under polygamy, Tell It All: The Tyranny of Mormonism surely belies her thesis that Mormon women (of her social standing at least) only deferred to their husbands on matters of family and church business.21 That Fanny dragged husband and children out of Mormonism and into an Evangelical assembly of her choosing speaks volumes. Indeed, Fanny’s profound unhappiness with Mormonism may have had less to do with her aversion to polygamy and more to do with her husband and his church’s desire that she become an equal participant in hitherto secret male rituals that she could not abide.22 The Endowment, to which Fanny so objected—an adoptive variation based loosely on the Master Mason initiation ritual, among other things—is intended to facilitate greater gender equality, both at the lodge or temple and at home. Here is the problem, for while Mormonism gave men veto power, should the (domestic) occasion call for it, ideally the Mormon home—polygamous and postpolygamous—was to be ruled in the spirit of true bipartisanship; hence revelation after revelation was addressed specifically to men warning them against the evils of “unrighteous dominion.” Instigating a reform movement within Masonry in the interest of greater equality between the sexes was not Smith’s only interest, for the Book of Mormon suggests that he also had plans for greater racial harmony—a system of interracial concubinage on a large scale, albeit carefully scripted and monitored by the Deity. When the Book of Mormon discusses polygamy as a way “to raise up seed,” the idea of “raising up seed” may have a qualitative connotation. As originally conceived, it surely asked a lot of white (and strictly monogamous) women, but of their understanding, not their participation. As a necessary evil in the divine scheme of things racial, it asked a lot of white men, too: to marry promiscuously outside their race in order that women of color might conceive a whiter and whiter Indian/African bloodline. The racism of it notwithstanding, at a time when most people believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and that chattel slavery was the most African men and women could ever hope for, the early Mormon hope (however flawed and racist) to return red and black to their original color (white) was daring. Moreover, it suggests that the Book of Mormon’s so-called feminist agenda did not discriminate on the basis of race. Seen another way, however, it discriminated against men of color as a matter of course. If this sounds too unbelievable to be true—or Masonic—one may consider the case of social anthropologist of note and author of League of the Iroquois

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(1851) Lewis Henry Morgan, who argued along similar lines. He started off as a Mason, too, a defender of Indian polygamy, although with the preservation of native peoples in mind.23 His defense of polygamy is noteworthy all the same, for it holds that descent was through the female, giving impetus to collective ownership of property and, most important, making every man the father of every child. The early Mormon practice of polygamy as an exclusively white affair was (the Book of Mormon notwithstanding) a most sincere form of flattery and undertaken with the same end in mind: to create a sense of community in which men had more than one wife and children more than one mother, ironically. Had Mormonism followed more closely the plan as outlined in the Book of Mormon, instead of representing mere Anglo-Saxon tribalism and a desperate flight from pluralism and quest for refuge, it might have been guilty of something utterly other: the dream of (Masonic) empire. As important as polygamy might have been, it was not an end in itself but a means to an end: the establishment of a Masonic/Templar Kingdom of God on earth in order to preserve the original republican and patriarchal system of government that the country had fought to establish against an encroaching Protestantism and virulent Evangelical feminism. Evangelicalism’s male ministers and female throng were considered a loose coalition of Puritans and theocrats hell-bent on destroying liberty, their preaching and incessant theological squabbling born of intolerance and motivated by a desire for absolute religious and political power. The Morgan affair and the rise of the Antimasonic Party with its unscrupulous attacks against men of Masonic sensibility (whether innocent or guilty) seemed not to bode well for the future of a Republic that, after all, Masons had had a hand in making. In hindsight, the Morgan affair ruined any chances of a Masonic Republic of the United States, ushering in the millennial reign of the Evangelical Empire and a certain tyranny of the (female moral) majority. In the midst of this contest of opinions—with gender at the center of the debate but by no means the only factor—Mormonism shot back, erring on the side of greater equality for women in hopes of restoring order along patriarchal lines: love at home and peace (once again?) throughout the land, perhaps even averting a bloody Civil War over slavery and ending the cruel scheme of Indian removal. How Smith hoped to pull this off, effect change without simply giving himself over to Evangelical feminism, was impressive indeed and might be described as an ingenious and selective use of Masonic folklore. Smith reworked in narrative form (and essentially by rote) the best-known Masonic publication of the day, Thomas Smith Webb’s The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of

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Freemasonry.24 The volume was certainly available to Smith, but the remarkable fact is that he undoubtedly never read it. That the Book of Mormon contains much that seems to have come straight out of Webb’s Monitor is simply a remarkable coincidence—not so remarkable, mind you, that a supernatural explanation is called for.25 More or less in keeping with my argument positioning the Book of Mormon as a type of nineteenth-century populist midrash (as opposed to mere rubbish as some would like to believe), Webb’s Monitor rather than the Bible makes slightly more sense as Smith’s canonical locus and interpretive jumping-off point for a whole array of creative departures. However, the esoterica of the Scottish Rite seems to be there, too, used sparingly and to the same end: the creation of a full-blown defense of androgynous Christian Masonry along hermetic lines. “Laboring under the disadvantage of having access to few or no printed standards of authority,” the writers of the History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders explain, “it is amazing that [American Masons] managed to retain and perpetuate so much of the ‘true principles of Ancient Craft Masonry.’ ”26 In some important respects, the Mormon prophet was driven by a strong desire to defend Masonry in America against attack. Under very trying circumstances, he may not have been entirely faithful to the tradition as some understood it; at the same time, his departures, whether planned or not, had a positive purpose. The writers of the Concordant Orders concede that “from a ritualistic point of view a new Masonry may be said to have been created” (pp. 701–702). In Webb’s Monitor, for example, is the so-called American Rite—thirteen degrees in all—the Scottish Rite included at first and then removed, the Knights Templar earning no better than honorable mention, three degrees in total, ceremonial, and constituting no part of Masonry. That the Book of Mormon can be seen as a fine specimen of antebellum Masonic literary mimesis with a very different agenda, a corrective perhaps to the alleged revisionist attempts of Masons like Webb, who were intent on doing away with the “mysteries” (which in Masonic parlance are the esoteric degrees of the Scottish Rite with its thirty-three degrees and the ninety degrees of the Egyptian Rite).27 However, “the misalliance of a degree distinctively Jewish in its teachings,” as one late-nineteenth-century monitor explains, “with others founded upon the Christian religion, and teaching distinctively Christian doctrines . . . from a ritualistic point of view, was unfortunate, and is to be regretted, more especially as it . . . renders special preparations necessary to enable our English and Canadian Fratres eligible to visit our bodies.”28 Elsewhere, the tone is less conciliatory. “It must be apparent to

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the most casual observer,” it says, “that the peculiar dogmas of Christianity could never have had any connection with the universal creed of modern Freemasonry; therefore a Masonic Christian Order of Knights Templars is an anomaly” (p. 780). Here was the problem, in short, and it would take a revelation from God to turn the tide of Masonic opinion. And so perhaps a pithy summary of my thesis will now prove comprehensible: The Book of Mormon can be seen as a well-crafted defense of Christian Masonry. The degrees of the Royal Arch, its strictly honorary set of chivalrous degrees, the Knights Templar, looking ahead to the no less chivalrous but mystical (or occult) degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite can be used to triangulate to a position for the Book of Mormon and the rationale of the Mormon faith. Smith hoped to outflank the Evangelical opposition by making the secret ritual world of manhood available to women, first in book form and subsequently in an androgynous Masonic raising ceremony indoors. What the Mormon prophet hoped to accomplish was the restoration of a beleaguered Masonic political order (looking backward and forward) that promised to end sectarian rivalry, reestablish social harmony, guarantee economic equality, and avoid racial discord through a carefully monitored system of polygamous mixed marriages.

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acknowledgments

   the following people for bringing my book into the world of academe; for holding my hand, stroking my head, wetting my tongue; for letting me know in loving ways that it wasn’t time; and finally for caring enough to get cross, telling me it was time to push. My Ph.D. supervisor, mentor, colleague, and friend Klaus J. Hansen deserves special mention. His defense of the anti-Evangelical roots of early Mormonism in his book Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago, 1981) brought me to Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, to study American cultural history under his tutelage and then to finish what I had started— a critical analysis of the Book of Mormon, which the highly respected Roman Catholic philosopher of religion Hugo A. Meynell at the University of Calgary had defended as a suitable M.A. thesis topic in Religious Studies, before it was topical to take seriously the religious ideas of ordinary folk. Had the late Canadian historian, erstwhile Mormon, and practicing Unitarian Howard Palmer not interceded on my behalf, things might not have gone so swimmingly. Unlike the fishing boat in the recent movie A Perfect Storm, which goes down with a full load of swordfish, my own perilous journey to the big water of American Masonry has been fortunate to make it back to port, thanks to Geoffrey Smith of Queen’s University—who pointed me in the direction of Columbia University Press—and Wendy Lochner at Columbia, who promised to make my manuscript her first priority and then was true to her word, as well as to John L. Brooke, Alfred Bush, and an anonymous third reviewer

I

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who recommended the manuscript for publication. A special word of thanks to my copy editor Sarah St. Onge for going the extra mile and then some, to Matthew Bucher (a Scottish Rite Mason, 32d Degree) for his generous input, to Arturo de Hoyes at the Scottish Rite temple in Washington, D.C., to Suzanne Ryan and Lisa Hamm, also at Columbia, to my brother Bohne Forsberg, Forsberg Graphics of Aylmer, Quebec, for the cover, and, of course, to Anne McCoy and Ron Harris for watching over the entire process and making sure that everything ran smoothly. The names of those who have played an academic part of one kind or another appear in the notes. I leave it to the reader to rank them, for I am at a loss. That said, I should like to single out a Calgary kitchen table as largely to blame. Around it a brave but misguided plan was hatched to foment a gender revolution by a local Mormon family of courage and vision. What pray tell will they make of this, or all the Mormon and non-Mormon friends over the years with whom I have sat down around a kitchen table of one kind or another to discuss the “Gospel” and badmouth the church. Finally, I would like to thank my family, my wife Spring and our two boys Kohl and Kynan, for their long-suffering above all. In honor of Spring (the season on par with the woman), I quote from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe where he says of his wife: She was, in a few Words, the Stay of all my affairs, the Centre of all my Enterprises, the Engine, that by her Prudence reduc’d me to the happy Compass I was in, from the most extravagant ruinous Project that flutter’d in my Head, as above; and did more . . . than a Mother’s tears, a Father’s Instructions, a Friend’s Counsel, or all my own reasoning Powers could do.

My only desire is that this book proves worthy of her. Any errors or faults are my responsibility alone.

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Equal Rites

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introduction: the wax and wane of masonry in american culture Masonry, like Christianity, must have her indiscreet champions. —Henry Leonard Stillson and William James Hughan, History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons

    In some respects, the question is not so much who they are but who they were. How many Masons are there worldwide? Depending on whom one asks, anywhere from one to five million. In the United States and Canada, for example, most towns and villages—and certainly larger metropolitan centers—have a Masonic temple to their credit, such inauspicious insignia as carpenter square, engineering compass, and capital G (a testament to Masonic reverence for the Deity) perhaps the only clues to what goes on (or perhaps went on) behind closed doors and boarded windows. And although some of these are merely architectural monuments to a bygone era, relegated to the status of local tourist attraction and cultural artifact, many are still in operation. At present, Masonry is growing by leaps and bounds in Latin America.1 (Incidentally, Mormonism has also done well in Latin America.) Whether Masonry simply refuses to die or is alive and well, there is no question that rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated. The apparent numerical strength of the movement of late has been long in coming and hard sledding, a remarkable comeback in the wake of some crushing defeats—one, in particular. No one knows better than Masons that a single blow on the chin can cost as much as the heavyweight championship of the world. And although the order will never live down the murder of Captain William Morgan by New York Masons in the mid-1820s, for which it was found guilty in the court of (Evangelical) public opinion and sentenced to obscurity at the time, it has

W

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

Introduction

nonetheless paid its debt to society and been granted an early parole (perhaps for good behavior). The question of who the Masons are should perhaps begin with when they first were—in other words, whether they can truly claim to be an ancient order of men and women, and, if not, what this might say about them. Masonry traces its origins to ancient Palestine and the construction of the temple of Solomon, claiming Hiram Abiff, Solomon’s chief architect, for its own. Murdered at the hands of fellow craftsmen for refusing to divulge craft secrets before the temple could be completed, the story of the death and resurrection of Hiram Abiff is to Masonry what the Exodus is to Judaism and, indeed, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is to Christianity. It turns out that the gruesome killing of the first Master Mason was not to keep trade secrets from leaking out (nor to protect some formula for the perfect mortar or a more economical solution to an engineering or architectural conundrum that competitors would surely steal) but rather about how to prevent religious secrets (male mysteries) from falling into the wrong hands. Hiram Abiff is held up by Masons the world over as a symbol of virtue and bravery (in the manly arts), and Masonic ritual at its core is a memorial to this everyman’s man’s man. Profane history is conspicuously silent on the matter. There is no mention of Hiram Abiff per se and a scuffle involving a chief architect and an impatient pack of vengeful apprentice masons in the Bible. Nothing about a search party of loyal followers apprehending the murderers (tearing out their tongues, slitting their throats, and spilling their guts as punishment) and finding the body of their mentor so badly decomposed that they had to lift it from its shallow grave using an intimate male embrace known in Masonic rituals as the five points of fellowship. Nor is it anywhere said that afterward Solomon, king of Israel, revealed to this faithful few a grand omnific word, instructing them in the niceties of a ritual in honor of their fallen general. Extracanonical sources (the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls) prove no help, either. In fact, the paucity of documentary and archaeological evidence suggests that the story of Hiram Abiff is simply a figment of some fertile imagination. But, then again, so were Moses and possibly even Muhammad. Gautama the Buddha is more than likely an invention. The list is endless. And while the founder of Christianity is uniquely historical, there is the unfortunate and inescapable fact that the New Testament offers the only proof of his resurrection. Of course, there is still plenty of optimism in both the Christian and Masonic camps that someday a pristine document will appear on the scene—locked away in some subterranean vault—testifying to

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

the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the exhumation of Hiram Abiff, respectively. The search for such a text is the mythica stock-in-trade of Masonry—and of Mormonism, too. In both cases, the hoped-for proof takes the form of the golden plates (of Enoch), one or several, and/or a lost gospel that is said to have made the rounds, discovered and rediscovered by Masons and would-be Masons. First a bit of serendipitous excavating at the construction of the Second Temple and then digging through the rubble in the aftermath of its destruction by the Romans set the stage for a kind of quest for the holy grail: the discovery of the father of all patriarchal scriptures, Enoch’s lost engravings, to which Jesus will be privy in time. The Lord and Savior, it turns out, was a member of the brotherhood. The list of distinguished Old Testament and New Testament Masons grew as the movement pushed forward into the Middle Ages, adopting the heroic French Knights of Templar in the corps of manly men, although they were but honorary members at first. Betrayed by King Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V at the beginning of the fourteenth century, according to some Masons, the Templars were not all murdered,2 a faithful remnant sailing to America long before Columbus, navigating using a “lodestone compass and astrological maps” (p. 77).3 They also carried with them a secret gospel of Jesus—a pristine copy of the scriptures, in short—that they hid lest it fall into the hands of mendacious and willful copyists.4 This, of course, is the bare-bones Masonic account. Depending on who you read, the order traces its origins to Adam in the Garden of Eden, or to the Tower of Babel, or only to the construction of the Temple of Solomon, perhaps as recently as the Second Temple and the advent of Jesus, or—playing it really safe—the Crusades. It can all get terribly confusing. How Jesus got on the ticket, for example, is a good question—he was a good vice president but only picked to mollify the Christian element in the party, meant to be seen (at fund-raisers mostly) but not heard. What role the Knights Templar played in the new administration and its bloated bureaucracy of new arrivals is no less problematic. The War Department? The Justice Department? Secretary of Defense? Secretary of State? Then again, in the opinion of some, the Knights Templar are no less ceremonial than Jesus (their mentor), representing the pomp of Masonry and no more than that. Their critics within the movement are inclined to characterize them in the most unfavorable light as a bunch of saber rattlers who only knew how to toot their (own) horns in military formation as loudly and as inharmoniously as possible, to the cheers of an undiscerning crowd. The idea that such men and women (among their apparent failings is a

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(a)

(b)

(c)

  a. Masonic Degree Certificate b. Master Mason Degree Certificate c. Royal Arch Degree Certificate Preface to Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorston, ), vol. .

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(d)

(e)

(f )

  d. Scottish Rite Degree Certificate e. Miscellaneous Higher Degrees f. Knights Templar Degree Certificate Preface to Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorston, ), vol. .

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

Introduction

fledgling belief in women’s rights), the idea that women could ever be accorded any real power (or the priesthood) stretched the limits of Masonic credulity. A dispute over the role of Jesus and his crusading knights has raged for centuries, but only two or three rather than ten or twenty. The oldest Masonic Grand Lodge on record dates back only to 1717, located in London, England, not Jerusalem. It consisted of two and then three degrees: Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. The lodge practiced the oldest and most orthodox variety of Freemasonry, known as Craft Masonry (Tory blue was its color of choice, hence the appellation Blue Lodge). The Masonic Knights Templar come later, a midto late-eighteenth-century invention of British/Scottish design, the brainchild of Andrew Michael Ramsay, a nobleman with a flair for the dramatic. Chevalier Ramsay, the French title notwithstanding, was a Scot and a bit of a rabble-rouser. The new system of degrees he inspired and all the attendant medieval mythology (chiefly regarding the Knights Templar) made the order more accessible to moderate propertied men despite the fact that his intention was to make it more aristocratic. Craft Masonry had become a crafty business, indeed, made up exclusively of the aristocracy (English, French, German, and Russian). The advent of Royal Arch masonry changed this, adding to and expanding on the original three. Its spin on the discovery of lost scripture in the Bible turned the tables, accusing Craft Masonry of being a modern invention. Ironically, devotees of the older Craft degrees would be forced to accept the polemical designation he assigned them, “Moderns,” despite the fact that the real moderns were Ramsay’s self-proclaimed Ancients. Proponents of this Royal Arch or Ancient Masonry, not too surprisingly, dress themselves in red. High atop the Royal Arch were the so-called Chivalrous degrees, where the Masonic Knights Templar and other Christian degrees were entered into the books—white and black the colors of the Knights Templar. There are other degrees, in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, for example, a fork in the ritual road. After becoming a Master Mason, one has the choice of pursuing the Royal Arch and/or the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. The Royal Arch gets one to the top of the mountain quicker, consisting of only thirteen degrees all told, whereas the Scottish Rite has more than double that—twenty-nine in all, not counting the initial three of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. At the summit, a degree entitled “Sovereign Grand Inspector General” makes the total thirty-three. In fact, however, should one choose to make the climb to the summit via both the Royal Arch and the Scottish Rite, this is entirely acceptable, for the argument is that nothing truly exceeds the Third Degree of Master Mason.

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Introduction 

There is considerable overlapping and even a measure of professional jealousy between Royal Arch and Scottish Rite Masons.5 To avoid confusion, I will take Webb’s Monitor, which adheres to the York line of progression, as normative. It consists of the following: the Capitular Degrees of Mark Master Mason, Past Master, Most Excellent Master and Royal Arch Mason, followed by the Cryptic Degrees of Royal Master, Select Master, and Super Excellent Master, these last make one eligible to apply for membership in a “Commandery” or “Encampment” of Knights Templar and receive the degrees of Red Cross Knight, Knight Templar, and Knight of Malta. Masonry (red, white/black, and blue) made the perilous journey across the Atlantic in plenty of time to play a role in the War of Independence and the governance of the Great Republic in the years to follow. Whether Masons were patriots or not seems to have depended largely on what kind of Masons they were. Royal Arch or York Masons (their penchant for red notwithstanding) wore a blue uniform as a rule, whereas blue-blooded Craft Masons tended to drape themselves in red. After a bloody civil war with Mother England to rid the colony of the vestiges of monarchy, one might wonder why the idea of draping the entire country in the black robes of French monasticism and medieval chivalry was never more appealing. But if this seems quite unthinkable at the dawn of the first republican democracies in the modern age, we postmoderns should consider that our own history has a few (Masonic?) wrinkles that may need ironing out—the War of Independence may have been fought to revitalize the eighteenth-century republican-monarchical synthesis being one.6 Whatever the reasons, the Masonic presence in American society was significant immediately following the Revolution and up until the murder of Captain William Morgan in the late 1820s. For as many as fifty years, if what Brooke and others have to say is correct, Masonry played a profound role in the new republic at every level of government.7 From small acorns grew a mighty oak of liberty (watered with blood of patriots who liked to play dress-up?). In some important respects, Masonry (not unlike America) owes its existence to the tradition of boys’ night out, the need for exclusive male companionship felt most acutely in the eighteenth century by many in the upper classes, who wished to flee the debilitating effects of parlor and pulpit for the freedom of wrestling their chums to the ground under cover of darkness, dancing half naked, beating their chests, and howling at the moon with impunity. At worst, Masonry was and is the stuff of Peter Pan. From the start, though, such male bonding was attacked as Satanic. That this accusation was quite false, together with the one that Masons drank blood,8

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Introduction

made no difference: the clergy (Catholic and Protestant) still saw red. It is difficult to say what bothered America’s Evangelical establishment more: that Masonry seemed poised to replace them as the core religion of the United States or that it threatened to become the official church of the nation. And the fact that Masons had Jesus on the ticket only made matters worse. Tony Fels explains that Masonry became the basis for a widespread “non-Evangelical alliance.”9 In short, orthodox Protestants had been right to suspect that Masonry (and Christian Masonry especially, should it ever get up and running) did not bode well for the future of Evangelical Protestantism in America. Masonry in Federalist Connecticut, as Dorothy Ann Lipson explains, “commanded . . . wide participation and allegiance and became the prototype of most other fraternal and service organizations.”10 Elsewhere she goes on to say that the “single most threatening aspect of Masonry was that some members used the association as if it were a religious denomination or, more threatening yet, an alternative to religion” (p. 8). Colonial Masonry posed less of an immediate threat; it was the domain of too many gentlemen. As Steven Bullock explains, the lodge was largely a place to “build elite solidarity and to emphasize their elevation above common people.”11 Nothing about the degrees, offices, or even the lodge itself was likely to attract adherents from the middling ranks. Evangelicalism was quite safe. Colonial Masons were notorious for their elegant attire, the Masonic funeral procession an ostentatious affair, underscoring an apparent lack of political, social, and economic decorum in the face of democratic reforms. Their gaudy dress made an even bigger splash at theaters and local clubs, and they upstaged the clergy at swanky religious affairs whenever they could (p. 57). Not the stuff of the local corn boil, Masonic banquets were notorious for being overly posh affairs—second only to the lodge itself, which was pricier and more exclusive by far. Moreover, “the deliberately high expense of Freemasonry,” Bullock writes, “formed only one of a series of barriers meant to keep out the improper” (p. 63). The secret ballot and black ball guaranteed the exclusion of any coarse and blundering common folk (p. 68). However, as the mood of the country changed from exclusion to inclusion, so did Masonry. In fact, it placed supreme faith in a kind of moral trickle-down effect. George Washington’s famous dedication of the Capitol in 1793 as a Masonic temple is a case in point. This was no mere cornerstone ceremony using the Masonic symbols of corn, oil, and wine—though it was (and still is) customary for Masons to dedicate most buildings (even churches). Dusting off his Masonic cap and gown, Washington used the event to redefine America’s place

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

  The Goose and Gridiron Tavern, London, birthplace of the Grand Lodge of England Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorsten, 1911), 3:134a.

in history according to a Masonic timetable, “the year of Masonry, 5793” (cited on p. 137). The importance of the event was not lost on Thomas Jefferson, who took for granted that the Capitol was a monument to the greater Masonic good of the new republic—a “temple [Masonic lodge] dedicated to the sovereignty of the people” (ibid.). The idea of the White House as Grand Lodge (an idea only, but a grand one all the same) had important implications for the thousands of

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Introduction

  Brother George Washington, Master Mason, August 4, 1758 Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorsten, 1911), 4:362b.

lodges to spring up in the coming years, consecrated to the American way and where the business of American republicanism and moral education of the citizenry would take place from the ground up. Rather than a conflation of lodge and state, though, Masonry and Washington, D.C., were a symbiosis—a close association of two dissimilar organisms that was mutually beneficial. In fact, Masonic dedication of the Capitol can also be seen as an attempt to co-opt the order. Washington was a practicing Mason, but, when pushed, he

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

was just as likely to reprimand the brotherhood in the interest of political expediency. Neither could Jefferson be trusted to defend Masonry, right or wrong, for he was an outsider through and through. Even Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the most dogmatic of the Masonic founding fathers, put his fraternalism in a bottom drawer, and, not unlike the piety of Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he opened that drawer years later he discovered to his dismay that it was empty. Franklin, like many Masons of his class at the end of the eighteenth century (and indeed as they reached ripe old age themselves), seemed to abandon an order that, for him at least, had outlived its usefulness. Franklin’s rise up the ranks may be attributable to his erstwhile Masonic vows and associations, but he may have turned away from them when he found something infinitely more gratifying than its ritual celebration of science and learning. Masonry itself changed to suit the times, favoring more mainstream messages and methods. The new message was that a naive belief in science and a plethora of newfangled gadgetry would make of a nation of republican behavers, Masonic believers, and vice versa. Enter the great bugaboo of postmodernist angst: mass media. In light of the democratization of information, Masonry’s days were perhaps numbered, the idea of passing knowledge from father to son bound for the scrap heap. The free press, not the freemason,13 would become the medium of the new age for the “instruction of all ranks of people . . . in those secrets of the arts and sciences” hitherto the preserve of so many gentlemen.14 Ironically, the apotheosis of science quickly turned the lodge into the abode of just as many gentlemen as before, snooty afficionados of the cult of pure reason. Potential lovers of learning, taste, and philosophy who required a leg up were getting the boot in order to make room for the likes of Tennessee Grand Master Wilkins Tannehill. His 1829 Sketches of the History of Literature, a sophisticated translation and exegesis of ancient Palestinian texts, speaks volumes of a creeping elitism. Tannehill’s characterization of the work as but “the humble pretensions of a backwoodsman” has all the credibility of a political acceptance speech in the antebellum Deep South.15 The concessions necessary to keep Tannehill happy were almost certain to anger so-called lesser men, the generation of young American males on the frontier eager to stake their claim in accordance with a more democratic order of conduct. “By the beginning of the . . . century,” Bullock writes, “more American lodges met in inland villages than on the urban seaboard.”16 Masonry in America divided squarely down the middle between Ancients and Moderns. Brooke argues in the same vein:

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  Brother Benjamin Franklin, Provincial Grand Master of Pennsylvania, 1734 Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorsten, 1911), 4:244b.

Royal Arch Masonry, after all, had been born of schism and class strife . . . a group of provincial lodges declared themselves the “Ancient Rite” and decried the London Grand Lodge as a debased “Modern” version. In great part this was a classbased schism, with artisans and small shopkeepers resenting the pretensions of the aristocrats who controlled the London Grand Lodge. The Ancient Masons claimed that the London Grand Lodge had changed Masonic history in abandoning some

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

of the material connecting the order to Old Testament times. But the Ancients made innovations of their own, adding a fourth degree, the Royal Arch, to the three basic degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason.17

     the story of Enoch’s underground vault of lost wisdom inscribed on gold, brass, and marble that he hid there for safekeeping and future reference should the standing order get too big for its britches. As early as Franklin’s return to Philadelphia in 1785, the Royal Arch, or Ancient Order of the Priesthood, was a force to be reckoned with. Suddenly, it was the cosmopolitan Franklin who was not likely to feel much like participating; nor was he entirely welcome to do so, not without submitting to a somewhat degrading healing ceremony. His refusal, claiming it would be unbecoming to a gentleman, could only be interpreted as a thinly veiled criticism of the entire nascent Royal Arch or York system of Masonry. When Franklin died five years later, Philadelphia Masons (almost to a man) failed to attend his funeral, let alone give the event their blessing. If blackballed in death by these “pretenders to the throne,” this slight however one conceives it would not have caused him to shift his weight to one side, let alone turn in his coffin. Whether Moderns or cosmopolitan Masons like Franklin were guilty of climbing into bed with the state and thus deserved what they got was most assuredly a moot point in the years to follow. The Ancients quickly made it their mission to court the church with the same gusto. Enter the Knights Templar, an honorary set of Masonic degrees on the books for a little while at this point. These new kids on the (Masonic) block were patterned after the New Testament rather than the Old (a significant departure), representing a small but significant patch of common ground where a historic Masonic-Protestant interfaith dialogue might take place. The case of New York Royal Arch Mason Salem Town is instructive. His System of Speculative Masonry (1818) argues that Masonry and Christianity are “the same truth” and thus both divinely inspired.18 While the marriage was not quite made in heaven, the fraternity’s standing in the eyes of the public made some enormous gains as it attracted growing numbers of the clergy in its ranks.19 Town was one of several Christianizers of Masonry, hoping to mend the rift that divided Ancients and Moderns by means of a Christian exegesis of the Craft degrees, in particular seeing in the raising of the Master Mason a type of Christ. George Oliver, an English cleric of noble Anglican blood, was another.20 His Christian spin called for a much older dating system for the order—reaching back to the time of Adam and Eve, no less—claiming that Seth had practiced a form of

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Introduction

“Primitive or Pure Freemasonry” that, among other things, had been a rite that anxiously awaited the coming of Christ.21 The third member of this trinity was another Englishman, William Hutchinson, whose Spirit of Freemasonry (first published in 1775) would be translated into several languages and undergo numerous printings but, owing to its exclusively Christian interpretation of the Master Mason degree, as one Masonic encyclopedia explains, would “not be received as the dogma of the present day.”22 The ecumenism of Oliver and Hutchinson bore fruit nonetheless, the so-called Union of 1813 that, in England at least, brought an end to the bitter rivalries that had divided Ancients and Moderns, who came together under the present United Grand Lodge of England, which nevertheless seems to favor the Moderns (2:1066). Ancients and Moderns battled it out on American soil, too, with the Ancients winning the battle but not the war. The war would be a very different fight, indeed, rather less amenable to union as such—and between the Royal Arch Knights Templar and the Scottish Rite. The latter, a plethora of knightly designations with a gnostic and hermetic quality, came to the United States by way of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1783, its first Supreme Council headed by John Mitchell and Frederick Dalcho in 1801 (2:916). The Scottish Rite is the more esoteric of the two, having a neo-Christian agenda, boasting thirty-three degrees in all:

.   1. Entered Apprentice 2. Fellow Craft 3. Master Mason

.    4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Secret Master Perfect Master Intimate Secretary Provost and Judge Intendant of the Building Elu, or Elected Knight, of the Nine Illustrious Elect, or Elu, of the Fifteen Sublime Knight Elect, or Elu, of the Twelve Grand Master Architect Knight of the Ninth Arch, or Royal Arch of Solomon Grand Elect, Perfect and Sublime Mason, or Perfect Elu.

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.     15. 16. 17. 18.

Knight of the East Prince of Jerusalem Knight of the East and West Prince Rose Croix

.    19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Grand Pontiff Grand Master of Symbolic Lodges Noachite, or Prussian Knight Knight of the Royal Ax, or Prince of Libanus Chief of the Tabernacle Prince of the Tabernacle Knight of the Brazen Serpent Prince of Mercy Knight of the Commander of the Temple Knight of the Sun, or Prince Adept Grand Scottish Knight of Saint Andrew Knight Kadosh

.      ,     31. Inspector Inquisitor Commander 32. Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret

.   33. Sovereign Grand Inspector General—Honorary

With so much about the order (both the Royal Arch/Templar and Royal Secret/Scottish chivalric streams) that was friendly to Christianity (and despite its medieval and even Roman Catholic airs) the Protestant clergy in America were inclined to lend their support—so long as they received special treatment, that is. Masons were quick to oblige, too, remitting membership fees for the clergy as a matter of course.23 A new office was created in the Royal Arch or American Rite, that of “Grand Chaplain.” The Grand Lodge of Connecticut appointed W. Bishop Jarvis of the Episcopal Church to preside over its meetings, public and private (pp. 128–129). Over a hundred clergy had joined Connecticut lodges by 1830, a third of them Episcopalians (p. 128 n. 35).24 The other two-thirds were

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Universalists, including Hosea Ballou and Elnathan Winchester, cofounders of Universalism in America.25 At first, as Lipson explains, “the only available [clerical] sponsorship came from countervailing denominations.”26 Before long, however, Congregationalists in Connecticut had buried the hatchet. In 1825 the Grand Lodge appointed its first Congregational Grand Chaplain, the Reverend Charles A. Boardman of New Preston (p. 131). Methodism followed suit, the eccentric itinerant minister Lorenzo Dow preaching the message of Christian Masonry throughout the land and with impunity.27 The editor of the Methodist Zion’s Herald likewise saw no contradiction between his Christian faith and Masonic vows.28 Masons began holding some meetings at local Evangelical meeting houses, another testament to Masonic-Protestant relations. At about this time, religious tests were added to the Masonic ritual in order to reflect better the new, middle-class Evangelical sensibility: belief in God, in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and in his resurrection, as well as the exhumation of Hiram Abiff. For some, the growing Evangelical presence at the lodge did not bode well for the order. A degree of sectarian divisiveness was detectable, too, something foreign to Masonry, in principle at least. The so-called Jewish question divided Royal Arch Masons along promission and antimission lines. In 1822 the Hiram Lodge of New Haven formed the New-Haven Palestinian Missionary Society in hopes of diffusing “the Holy Scriptures among benighted heathen people, and having a particular desire to promote the happiness of our Jewish brethren, and others in Palestine.”29 In 1823 the Olive Branch Council of Select Masters— a Royal Arch lodge—sent the following admonition to the brethren in northeastern Connecticut, stating that in the general spirit of philanthropy to awake from [their] slumbers to demonstrate, by active benevolence, that when we speak of Masonry, we mean something more than the gratification of the Epicure—Where are the descendants of those Master Builders, who rendered Mount Moriah the religious center of the world? To the Jewish Nation we are indebted for all that is ancient, judicious and distinct in Masonry. From them under the great I AM, we derive all we know of the history of man and the will of Heaven, anterior to the advent of the long promised Messiah. (cited on p. 183)

    , Masonry seemed to take on the appearance of its nemesis, Evangelical Protestantism. In 1816 the General Grand Encampment of the United States was formed, with DeWitt Clinton (New York’s governor, no less) named General Grand

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Master and Thomas Smith Webb Deputy General Grand Master. Templars were to be found in New York before this, but as “Sir Knight Robert Macoy,” Grand Recorder of the Grand Encampment of New York in 1851, would later go on to lament, the Knights Templar of that state did not receive authorization to grant warrants until 1797.30 One reason for confusion is that New York state had been home to numerous self-created Templar Encampments “governed by their own private and individual laws, acknowledging no superior authority” (5:218). DeWitt Clinton may have hoped to effect a union of his own, rallying New York’s best and brightest, elites of Masonic-Christian sensibility, to help to reestablish the old pecking order in the interest of social harmony— and likely to increase Masonic coffers and his chances for reelection, too. In the Conventions of New York Knights Templar for the years 1816, 1819, 1826, and 1829 the names of the state’s upper crust appear in spades. Notably, the presiding General Grand Prelate at the time of the Morgan affair was the distinguished Rev. Paul Dean (1816–1826); thereafter the title passed to Rev. Gregory T. Bedell (1826–1829) and then to Rev. Ezekiel L. Bascom in 1829. The Grand Encampment of the United States was not so much grand as an elitist and priestly bunch as deeply divided as any Protestant assembly of the time. Then, to make matters infinitely worse, under the not so watchful or moral eye of the same Grand Encampment of Knights Templar, there followed a murder indictment and attempted cover-up. Was the game over? The end of Masonry or just the beginning? Enter Joseph Smith Jr., the soon-to-be Mormon prophet. Had the founder of Mormonism been able to waltz into one of several lodges in the immediate vicinity—at twenty-one, as was the custom and his birthright, being of Royal Arch stock—had he been able to start the long ascent up the mystical ladder of manhood through the normal channels (all things being equal), he no doubt would not have gone on to become the Mormon prophet but a Masonic luminary of some lesser distinction. The Morgan affair, in short, left young prospective Masons of Smith’s generation without a lodge to be in. In Smith’s case, he ran the risk of being rejected on account of a limp, and so, in some respects, massive lodge closures gave him just the excuse he needed to start something Masonic of his own. Morgan’s widow later became one of Smith’s wives, but he and Morgan had more in common than a liking for the erstwhile Lucinda Pendleton.31 But that they shared a strong desire to bring Masonry down a notch or two is no foregone conclusion. First Morgan and then Smith might just as easily be seen as among Masonry’s so-called indiscreet champions. Supporting this is the very

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plausible Masonic retort that Morgan’s death was a freak, an accident, the work of rogue Masons who at worst were guilty of negligent homicide, not a cold or calculated act of premeditated murder, and that the Grand Lodge had no hand in it. What, after all, had Morgan done that was so wrong? Was it really that he hoped to bring down the order by publishing a blow-by-blow account of the ritual? Or was it that by doing so he threatened to rally Masons or would-be Masons around a new captain of the guard—men of his social standing who, like him, were being discriminated against on the basis of their class? Morgan’s Masonic credentials are spurious at best. Allegedly, he was a Royal Arch Mason and member of the LeRoy, New York, Lodge (No. 33) in 1825, declaring on his honor to have received the previous six degrees in the “proper manner.”32 Moving to Batavia a short time later, he was denied admission to a Royal Arch chapter there. A petition for a new one bearing his name was also rejected, whreas a second containing the names of Batavia’s better sort (who were openly hostile to Morgan) proved successful. And if that were not enough, when Morgan swallowed his pride and tendered an application to join, he was blackballed. This marked the end of his Masonic career for all intents and purposes. Teaming up with another blackballed applicant, editor of the Republican Advocate David C. Miller, he no doubt hoped to get even, living the good Masonic life—with or without the blessing of the Grand Lodge—as the best revenge. That he intended to publish a Masonic manual or “monitor” rather than a mere Evangelical polemic in the hopes that large numbers of like-minded men would follow his lead is not an impossibility. It makes no sense to say that Morgan stepped over the line and out of the Masonic camp when he published his Illustrations of Freemasonry, given the vast number of Masonic monitors in existence, available to the general public and containing long excerpts from the Masonic ritual—some of these as detached as Morgan’s. The gentlemen of the Jerusalem Lodge in London, for example, published an account of the Masonic rituals as early as 1762, the famous Jachin and Boaz, defending their publication as a pro-Masonic work designed to “strengthen [rather] than hurt the society . . . to please . . . [their] brethren” and most certainly not done with ‘a view of gain.’ ”33 In their view, a candid account by Masons of the rituals to manhood could prove beneficial to the movement, preferable to that “which hitherto has been represented in such frightful shapes” by their enemies (p. iv). Morgan’s Illustrations of Freemasonry contains little in the way of editorial comment, presenting rather an unvarnished recitative that took its cue from William Preston’s Illustrations of Freemasonry (first published in London in 1772)34 and Thomas Smith Webb’s famous Freemason’s

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Monitor; or Illustrations of Freemasonry (first published in the United States in Albany, N.Y., in 1797). Thirteen editions of Jachin and Boaz had been published in America between 1790 and 1820. It seems that Morgan had every Masonic right to add to the corpus. By the time Morgan’s turn came along, however, it was becoming fashionable to nip such revisionism in the bud. American Royal Arch Masons were closing ranks around Webb’s Monitor, elevating it to canonical status. Webb was well positioned, a Masonic leader at the state level. Postbellum Masonic apologist Rob Morris explains in the preface of his edition of the Monitor: “In all my teachings as a Masonic lecturer, I have urged that whatever merits the fifteen or twenty Handbooks in use among us possessed over this, or one another, it was merely for their pictorial embellishments; the monitorial and really essential parts being but copies of this, with unimportant additions. I have never thought their dissemination, to the exclusion of Webb’s Monitor, the true policy of the Craft.”35 Morris continues: “If, as is fondly hoped, the establishment of Masonic Schools of Instruction, teaching nothing but the ‘Webb Work,’ should be crowned with general success, an important feature in them must be a uniform text-book. The FREEMASON’S MONITOR must of course possess the only claim to that position” (p. x). One detects a Protestant canonical bias here, a variant of the sola scriptura doctrine, with Webb and only Webb as the standard for belief and practice. Publishing a competing Masonic monitor in America after 1819 (superseding Webb in some way) had become a risky business by the late 1820s. Morgan perhaps knew this but was willing to risk it. He paid with his life. More problematic by far than Morgan’s murder, it turns out, was the Masonic establishment’s attempt to cover it up. Men of standing and honor, indeed! Let New York Masonry say what it will about a bribe that Morgan allegedly took to disappear forever, there is no way around the issue of Masonic jury tampering. Hiram Hopkins, implicated in the kidnapping, recalled that during his own Masonic initiation ritual in August 1826 his “guide” had first informed him of Morgan’s plans to “publish Masonry.” He also confessed that he thought Morgan “deserved to die.”36 Such stern enforcement of the penal oath of absolute secrecy is rare, but rumors of Morgan’s plan to reveal the “Grand Omnific Royal Arch Word” sealed his fate.37 Masons put pressure on Morgan and Miller not to publish Illusrations of Freemasonry, going so far as an attempt to burn down Miller’s printing office. What came out did not go beyond the first three degrees, in fact. Morgan may even have survived its publication— but not for long.

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  Brother Thomas Smith Webb Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorsten, 1911), 5:478b.

The following detailed description in Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected of the penalty for breaking one’s promise “not to Write” the secrets or “cause them to be written” paints a gruesome picture and may explain why Morgan’s body was never recovered. The oath of secrecy in Prichard’s monitor is a ban on publication “under no less penalty,” it says, “than to have my Throat cut, my Tongue taken from the roof of my Mouth, my heart plucked from under my left breast; then to be buried in the Sand of the Sea, where the Tide ebbs

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and flows twice in twenty-four Hours; my body to be burnt to Ashes, my Ashes to be scattered upon the face of the Earth, so that there shall be no more rememberance of me among Masons.”38 Suffice it to say that the murder, if Masonic, did not have the desired result. Hopkins, who turned state’s evidence and then on his brothers, would eventually claim that he had been shocked to learn that his cousin, Niagara County sheriff and coconspirator Eli Bruce, executed Morgan a few months later merely to avoid prosecution. It was a despicable, stupid killing utterly unbecoming of the brotherhood—secret blood oaths notwithstanding. That was not the biggest problem, however. At the behest of Bruce, Hopkins allegedly packed the jury with fellow Masons, who swore an oath to perjure themselves. When it was all over, a few convictions were handed down, but sentences seemed on the short side. Bruce, who orchestrated the kidnapping and brutal slaying, only got a little over two years.39 Regardless, Masonry would pay dearly in the months to come, not for the murder so much as for its role in the cover-up. But if the Morgan affair brought about the end of an administration, it was not the end of Masonry—far from it. American Masonry would live to fight another day, and not simply because of the efforts of its Robert Morrises but because of its William Morgans, too. Thomas Paine’s incendiary Age of Reason (part 1 published in 1794, part 2 in 1796) is a case in point—a thinly veiled defense of Masonry that attacked revealed religion mercilessly, terming the divinity of Jesus and the sanctity of the Bible the stuff of credulity and Freemasonry thus a more viable religious alternative for men of reason.40 The Age of Reason succeeded in so angering the Evangelical opposition that the Second Great Awakening can in some important respects be credited to Paine and providence! Most of Paine’s powerful friends in Washington, President Thomas Jefferson among them, advised against publishing such a religious (read Masonic) tract, on the grounds that, in the interest of social order, the common man should not be made privy to the “heretical” beliefs of the aristocracy. In hindsight, Paine would have been wise to choose a more discreet medium, and while The Age of Reason sold well, it ended the career of one of America’s most famous and influential patriots and propagandists for democratic change. Strangely, it does not appear that Paine was a Mason, only that he thought Masonry comparable to sun or nature worship and thus preferable to its “bastard child,” Christianity (son worship per se). That from a distance he waxed rhapsodic on the future of Masonry in America is telling.41 Prince Hall is another poignant example—unable to become a Mason through the normal “American” channels because of his race, in the end he gained

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entrance into the order by going over heads to obtain a charter from the Grand Lodge in England. (Mormon leadership also flirted with the idea of petitioning British Masonry for a charter but decided against this course largely because it seemed fraught with compromise and thus tantamount to mixing hair and wool.) Hall’s African Lodge, by all accounts, offered middle-class black men like himself a ritual gathering place where not only dreams of economic advancement but a strong desire to join the ranks of America’s white middle class might be realized. Ironically, Prince Hall Masons discriminated against darker-skinned applicants, especially the poor black masses, catering exclusively to black males of unquestionable bourgeois sensibility.42 To the great relief of the order—one presumes—the Morgan affair had almost no effect on African-American Masonry. The great bulk of anti-Masonic polemic would be directed entirely at white fraternal association, the Antimasonic Party operating largely under the (false) presumption that middle-class blacks (whether members of a Masonic lodge or not) posed no threat to democracy, perhaps because they were not expected to play a significant role in American society to begin with (p. 36). That said, the inconspicuous nature of Prince Hall Masonry served American Masonry very well, keeping the vision and the rituals alive during the difficult days—indeed years— that lay ahead. And so, not too far down the road from Batavia, in Palmyra, a New Yorker unlikely to gain entrance to the lodge through the regular channels would follow his own star, publishing a Masonic monitor and discreetly calling it the Book of Mormon, a literary springboard for yet another democratization of manhood in the spirit of Morgan and others. A cruel irony, Smith not only shared Morgan’s widow but eventually his fate, murdered by Masons and others who dressed mockingly in Indian costume and got off scot free. Not unlike Prince Hall, the founder of Mormonism also found himself on the outside peering in merely because of a physical handicap. Of New England stock and Masonic pedigree, he would not be denied his birthright as an American male and took the necessary steps to correct this—going over heads and crossing both ocean and channel, going not to the Jerusalem Lodge in London for his charter but to Jerusalem itself and the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and, ultimately, the Son of God for permission to start anew. Finally, not unlike Oliver, he hoped to reunite and revitalize American Masonry according to a Christian-Masonic vision, but along Templar lines in the broadest, most advanced, and hermetic sense, knitting the York and Scottish rites together into a seamless whole in the hopes of bringing about a union of Masonry and Christianity writ large.

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the mormon-masonic nexus

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  Lewis A. Ramsey, Joseph Smith Receives the Plates The Book of Mormon, large ed. (; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, )

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one

reading a sealed book

Take these words which are not sealed, and deliver them to another, that he may shew them unto the learned, saying: Read this, I pray thee. And the learned shall say, Bring hither the book, and I will read them: and now, because of the glory of the world, and to get gain, will they say this, and not for the glory of God. And the man shall say, I cannot bring the book, for it is sealed. Then shall the learned say, I cannot read it. —The Book of Mormon

  an upstate New Yorker published his own English translation of a lost history of the forefathers of the American Indians, written on golden tablets, that he called the Book of Mormon. Five thousand leather-bound copies were circulated by friends and family, but sales in New York proved disappointing, indeed something of a shock. The Book of Mormon has been dismissed by most nineteenth-century social and cultural historians as simply a poorly written, eccentric religious text of little or no importance to anyone but Mormons. How it came to be (purportedly through an angelic dictation, like the Qur’an), however, is precisely why historians ought to take the book very seriously—as an unvarnished account of America in the 1830s rather than a work of sober reflection, learning, and sophistication, so utterly sincere and uncontrived that an offer to punctuate the text by the publisher was almost more than author Joseph Smith Jr. could bear. Smith was not a writer: he dictated nearly everything with his name on it save a couple of letters to his wife Emma and the odd journal entry.1 He was not a writer in the literary sense, either, lacking the discipline and indeed the stomach to “murder his darlings,” as Bernard DeVoto once put it.2 Fawn Brodie, however—perhaps Mormonism’s most gifted writer—thought Smith no mean dramatic talent (emotional not intellectual), lacking only “the tempering influence that a more critical audience would have exercised upon it.”3 But this may not quite get at the central problem of any study of the life and work of the founder of Mormonism: how a first book that he dashed off in a

I

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matter of weeks became the basis for a new religious tradition—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the smaller but no less significant Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now the Community of Christ), the followers of Joseph Smith III and Emma Smith who chose to remain in the east, eventually reclaiming the original site of the early Mormon New Jerusalem (Independence, Missouri) near Kansas City as their capital and ecclesiastic command center. The Book of Mormon has not improved with age and some minor editing— at least not in the minds of most critics. As books go, it is still viewed as something of the ugly duckling of American religious prose. As religions go, however, Mormonism has gone on to become the goose who laid the golden egg, attracting a congregation of upwardly mobile, well-educated, middle-class men and women who are almost too American—conservative in lifestyle, Republican in politics, and evangelical in religion. To what degree such an impressive institution can be credited to a book not only of questionable literary value but constantly under attack for a multitude of gross historical inaccuracies and anthropological and archaeological anachronisms and, perhaps most vexing of all, persistently suspected of having been plagiarized in part or in whole is the question. And largely because it appears to insult the intelligence of literate and thinking people, purporting to be a revelation from on high, the great and overarching dream of most would-be deconstructions is to explain it using either as few or as many contemporary sources as their argument demands. And yet, after almost two hundred years, we may be no closer to unraveling the mystery of the so-called translation of the golden plates that Smith claimed to discover in a hill behind his home in Palmyra, New York, and published under his own name as the Book of Mormon in 1830. Unsure how he did it, we are even less sure why. The question of how he did it has tended to monopolize the discussion. Of course, Smith was not exactly silent on the matter, informing an incredulous press that he translated the golden plates by “the gift and power of God,” explaining that something he called “the Urim and Thummim” (taking his cue from the Old Testament, though yanked out of context) that had been included with the plates had made translating as simple as falling off a log. Few dispute Smith’s native intelligence or sense of his Yankee environs. The Book of Mormon, most critics agree, can be seen as a rather brilliant summary of all the major issues of his day. Of vast historical importance, the Mormon prophet can be seen as antebellum New York’s most famous and comprehensive chronicler of popular culture—preferring the company of people over a good book, heated debate rather than quiet reflection his modus operandi.4

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Reading a Sealed Book

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The idea of Smith as an aural-oral learner has possibilities and dire implications for understanding the man and his work, though I use it here merely as a heuristic device in an all-too-brief analysis of the important question of how before moving on to address in detail the whys and wherefores. My hope is to propose a much simpler, less sinister, and ultimately more plausible explanation than that trumpeted by critics and a growing number of self-appointed psychotherapists.5 Recent neo-Freudian attempts to suggest that a bone operation on his leg as a child (which left him crippled) is the alpha and omega of Smith are perhaps the worst offenders.6 Reductionist studies—past and present—seem too focused on the supposition that Smith had a parallel antebellum work open in front of him that he used extensively to create his own text, the main problem being that they have yet to put their hands on a copy of the posited manuscript that they can attribute to some poor New England cleric who was cheated out of his royalties by the “Mormon imposture.”7 The truth is that local libraries are likely only ever to offer clues to the mind of the Mormon prophet. But since the written record is all they have, scholars can only do their best, acknowledging that in the case of this aural-oral man his sum must remain quite a bit greater and more unwieldy than his parts. Smith was neither a writer nor a reader and why that was may go a long way toward answering the question of how and why he did all the things he did. The way he tells his story offers hints as to some of his epistemological strengths and weaknesses and how his mission could not avoid taking them into account, making the necessary, sometimes unconscious adjustments. That he claimed to translate using an instrument of Newtonian magnitude, rather than purely by divine inspiration, may be significant, for example. According to the orthodox understanding, the Urim and Thummim were two thick lenses that Smith used to read the original texts, simultaneously dictating the English translation to a scribe who sat on the opposite side of a drawn curtain.8 “These spectacles,” one contemporary source explains, “were so large, that, if a person attempted to look through them, his two eyes would have to be turned towards one of the glasses merely, the spectacles in question being altogether too large for the breadth of the human face. Whoever examined the plates through the spectacles, was enabled not only to read them, but fully to understand their meaning.”9 The Book of Mormon includes a discussion of the original language and script (Reformed Egyptian?), which, it suggests, allowed more to be crammed on one page than Hebrew would have permitted. Without the Urim and Thummim, or “interpreters,” as they are also known,10 one presumes that reading the text would stymie any ordinary reader. According to the scholarly

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account, Smith used a peep stone from his treasure-hunting days to read the original, burying his head in a hat to shut out any light and dictating extemporaneously for hours at a stretch.11 Although these accounts differ, both suggest that Smith’s natural vision was problematic and that he may not have been a reader because of a visual dysfunction. Those who seem confident that Smith must have translated with something in front of him, perhaps making modifications as he went along, do not give his prodigious memory the credit it may deserve. Again, the scholarly account suggests that the first 116 manuscript pages were lost, the golden plates and spectacles were returned to the angel and, along with the 116 pages, never seen again. The Book of Mormon as we have it was thus written completely from memory, or by inspiration. Martin Harris, scribe and financier of the first edition of the Book of Mormon, pestered Smith for proof of the veracity of the golden plates that he might show an expert of ancient languages. After much consternation, Smith consented to furnish him with a handwritten copy of the characters and other minutiae inscribed on the golden plates. The venerable Columbia College professor of Greek and Latin Charles Anthon agreed to meet with Harris and render an opinion. Harris insists that Anthon made a brief inspection and concluded that the hieroglyphs were true “Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac and Arabic” characters, wrote a letter to that effect, and then, after hearing that the plates had been a heavenly delivery, quickly tore it up. Anthon’s subsequent offer to translate seems to have been less than sincere; one can imagine him smirking when he invited Harris to bring the plates the next time he came to call. When Harris naively explained that a portion of the plates was sealed, Anthon simply replied, “I cannot read a sealed book.”12 In other words: Get out! A year or so after examining the parchment, Anthon described the pages as a truly awful transcription of Greek and Hebrew letters with a Mexican calendar thrown in for good measure.13 Had Anthon’s specialty been early childhood education rather than classics, he might have known better how to interpret it? His description is very revealing all the same: it was a “singular scrawl” consisting of “all kinds of crooked characters disposed in columns” (p. 14). So much crooked lettering and a penchant for vertical columns would have alerted any gradeschool teacher that here was proof not of a plan to deceive the learned but of a severe reading and writing disorder? The degree of scrawl is consistent not only with dyslexic transcription but with that done without the aid of a book—from memory, in short (one side effect of dyslexia is an inability to read and write across a page; the tendency is to curve the writing downward and to write in

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 a. A Facsimile of the Book of Mormon Characters William E. Barrett, The Restored Church (Salt Lake City: Deseret, ), p. 

9b and c. The Mark Hoffman Forgery of the Anthon Transcript Dean C. Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1984), pp. ‒.

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columns—especially when doing so without the aid of a text to copy).14 (Interestingly, many samples of Smith’s mature handwriting are perfectly legible, maintaining a steady flow of lettering across but down.)15 Lost in the shuffle and not likely ever to be recovered, should the Anthon transcript magically reappear,16 it would no doubt add further weight to the theory that Smith’s transcription story was a fabrication, something critics have concluded beyond any doubt of the Book of Abraham (another book of scripture he produced using extant Egyptian funeral texts). But the Book of Abraham merely furnishes clear proof that Smith did not translate in the conventional academic way, which is hardly conclusive evidence of deception since Smith made no claims to operate solely within the accepted norms of modern linguistics. He thumbed his nose at the Anthons, considering their lack of imagination a greater evil than his paucity of learning. And let us not forget that virtually no one in the academic community at that time, and certainly not Anthon, whose expertise was in Greek and Latin, could read Egyptian. For example, when Oliver Cowdery, another of Smith’s scribes, got to try on the mantle of extemporaneous translation, he failed miserably—largely, it seems, because he lacked the precise aural-oral and imaginative skills with which Smith was so richly endowed. In a special revelation after the fact, Smith forgives this failure, attributing it in part to Cowdery’s fear and lack of intuition and retention.17 “For, do you not behold that I have given my servant Joseph sufficient strength, whereby it is made up? And neither of you have I condemned” (sect. 9:12). Cowdery was, among other things, a schoolmaster (he taught some of the Smith children, in fact), and one suspects that with this revelation elevating the oral and imaginative above mere literacy in the divine scheme of things Smith may have been indulging in a little richly deserved payback for some injustice that he felt he had suffered at the hands of an antebellum schoolmarm. How then did Smith produce his masterwork? Not in so precise or literal a manner as most of his followers wanted to believe and indeed were led to believe, but not altogether differently from what Smith and witnesses claimed, either. In some respects, one cannot help admiring Smith’s courage, his refusal to let a handicap (several perhaps) stop him from his divinely appointed rounds. He went to extreme lengths, to be sure, but given the temper of the times his lack of candor was a necessary and altogether forgivable evil. In fact, the how leads naturally to the why, the ultimate reason for this inquiry. The idea of the Mormon prophet as an aural-oral man suggests that he was well suited to a classroom of another, altogether male, and, as it turns out,

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  Sample of Joseph Smith Jr.’s Handwriting (Early Adulthood) Dean C. Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, ), p. .

aural-oral kind, where his disabilities were cause for celebration rather than reason for a ruler across the knuckles. When one learns more about Smith’s native New York, one comes to see Smith as a natural leader in a decidedly patriarchal order of men for whom the spoken word and memory were paramount, who read and wrote as a last resort, books being a vehicle of enlightenment for lesser minds. The Masonic traditions of oral transmission from father to son in secret male rites of passage, the communication of cherished patriarchal shibboleths under cover of darkness in whispered tones—mouth to ear—the use of the blindfold and other highly symbolic and allegorical paraphernalia amounted to a perfect environment for someone like Smith, whose eyes were well suited to the dark (however one chooses to understand this). And then, without warning, tragedy struck, which for an aural-oral savant and Masonic hopeful like Smith made his bone operation a walk in the park: the murder of Captain

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William Morgan, a brother, by one or more of his own. The male world of his native United States and its premier educational, social, political, economic, and religious twin tower—Freemasonry—toppled to the ground, leaving Smith, a bemused Masonic sophomore, with few options but to build it anew or perish. I am not suggesting here that Smith’s eyes were so bad, his reading and writing so rudimentary, that we ought simply to take pity on the lad and the religion he miraculously cobbled together using a prodigious memory based on the spoken word. A manuscript copy of the Book of Mormon with someone else’s name on it has yet to be discovered.18 Until such time, it makes sense to presume that Smith is the book’s author. That he translated anything in the conventional sense seems unlikely, as I have already suggested, but that he plagiarized some written text makes even less sense if we agree that a reader he was not. There might even be a case for the golden plates, perhaps a Masonic mnemonic device that he used when translating. Returning to the Anthon transcript and the two facsimiles, one not fitting Anthon’s description and the other a modern fraud, what Harris gave the Columbia professor of Latin and Greek to examine might have looked something like the artifact reproduced in figure 11. This is not just any antebellum New York family magical “lamen,” or parchment, but the property of the Smith family, described in some sources as a “Holiness to the Lord” parchment with no connection to Masonry. It fits Anthon’s description of the characters he was shown: a singular scrawl with classical lettering going in every direction is precisely how a Classics professor might have seen it. If the Anthon transcript was indeed a transcription from memory by Smith—whose writing was not the best—then it would have been a sight to behold, to be sure. This Smith family treasure (and it is golden) might tell us a great deal about what Smith was cooking up behind a curtain, donning the biblical Urim and Thummim in order to see straight—if only we knew how to read it. What is remarkable about this artifact is how completely it describes what Smith would go on to create. Is this—the bad grammar of notwithstanding—the golden plates? While there is much about the Smith family parchment that is certainly hard to make out, not all of it—the characters, for example—is impossible to decipher. For this, we, like Smith himself, require the aid of the Urim and Thummim—or, rather, the knowledge that the Urim and Thummim Smith used come out of not the Bible but Masonry. A breastplate with two stone lenses affixed to a golden bow or chain is the Masonic representation of the device (a slight but important departure from the Bible). In Masonic encyclopedias, one can easily find the Urim and Thummim that Smith used, a device reserved for

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  “Holiness to the Lord,” Smith Family Artifact D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, ), figure .

“the High Priest alone, for the purpose of obtaining a revelation of the will of God in matters of great moment.”19 Smith drew a curtain or put his peep stone (which is what he apparently used) in a hat, out of sight—hiding the Urim and Thummim from view as the high priest of biblical and Masonic tradition is wont to do. Although he would not let anyone see the golden plates without the expressed permission of the Deity, they were, in some respects, a red herring; the real issue was whether anyone would be permitted to view the Urim and Thummim. According to the esoteric Masonic understanding, moreover, the Urim and Thummim have some connection to the Egyptian deities Ra and Theme—light and truth—the first of these said to function in a double capacity, increasing both physical and intellectual light (2:1072). One is reminded yet again of Smith’s visual acuity, or lack thereof. Understanding that the Smith family parchment can be read through Masonic lenses makes it possible to decode quite a lot of it. In fact, it is all too leg-

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ible. It can be seen as a Masonic tracing board, a kind of key containing all the important icons and Masonic essentials of the degrees. A border and the points of a compass are standard-issue Masonic iconography. The English at the top and sides, “Holiness to the Lord,” is the motto of the Royal Arch, and the Hebrew characters at the bottom (and perfectly good Hebrew it is) spell the Divine Name, which is the Grand Omnific Word of the Royal Arch and appears at the bottom of actual Royal Arch tracing boards. Just inside the border are three sets of identical lettering (the sort of Greek that Anthon ridiculed). These, too, are perfectly acceptable Masonic insignia, possibly shortened and symbolic representations of the Greek that appears in the Royal Arch tracing boards that made a brief appearance around the end of the eighteenth century. At the top center are the Greek capitals EN ARCH HN O LOGOS : “In the beginning was the Word” (2:885). It is in this Greek that the Smith family’s tracing board makes a classic mistake: their transcription begins with a capital sigma when it should be a Greek capital epsilon, ending with a backward version of the same letter, instead of a capital sigma per se (proof perhaps that their Greek was not the best). The second character in the string of Greek on the Smith’s tracing board is either an xi (X) or a theta (Q) if the lettering is read in a column from top to bottom. There are two Xs in Greek, C (chi) and X (xi). The former is the first letter in the word Christ, and that it looks like a cross has always been cause for Christian exegetes to break out the champagne. If the Greek on the sides of the Smith’s tracing board is an abbreviated form of EN ARCH HN O LOGOS , then the second character could represent ARCH , but with a X instead of a C . (When viewed from the side, it looks something like an all-seeing eye, more reminiscent of the symbolism of ancient Egypt than of early Christianity.) But this letter could also be a Q, or theta, the first letter of the Greek word for God, theos—QEOS if written in capital letters, qeoı in lowercase. (And if this is the word that is meant, what follows might simply read “the word of God,” a reference not to Christ, it turns out, but to “one who speaks [treats] of the gods and divine things, versed in the sacred science.”20 What looks like a capital s (laid on its front), the next letter in the series might be the Greek letter ı or a lowercase sigma. In Greek there are two sigmas: s is used when the letter occurs in the middle of a word, whereas ı is used at the end. Notably, vowels are absent. Hebrew is not vocalized. In that language, the vowels of the Divine Name are a mystery too. One does not read aloud, or even try to speak the ineffable name—and leaving out the vowels or inserting

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incorrect ones is how rabbis guarded against this. Thus what appear to be a capital letter i in brackets and a capital s on its face are more than likely the first and last consonants of the Greek word for God, Q>(eo)ı, or theos. Thus far the text reads, E(N)21 Q(eo)ı, or “in God.” What follows is not as straightforward or easy to read, but one suspects it is a variant of the Greek word LOGOS , logos, translated as “word.” But this string of characters, too, is pregnant with other possibilities. The fourth character in the series—leaning slightly to the right—looks for all the world like a capital letter l, not quite the lowercase lambda (l) but possibly the capital (L). The characters that follow appear to be a capital h with the number 2 drawn through it—probably intended to be a capital lambda (L), a crescent moon— likely some kind of magical symbol—and then a backward S or capital sigma. Here, too, vowels are omitted, in keeping with the Hebrew. The numeral 2–H combination could be shorthand for the two capital etas that appear back to back in EN ARCH HN O LOGOS . However, the character that looks for all the world like a number 2 could also be a lowercase gamma (g). The two vertical bars running perpendicular to the tail of the gamma form a double or “patriarchal” cross, the original badge of the Knights Templar and Knights of the Scottish Rite.22 In any event, the Greek atop the Smith family tracing board seems translatable as one of the following: “In God(’s) Word,” or “God in the Word,” or “in God is the Word,” or, finally, “the Word is in God.” If Logos here is Christ, then the passage may read “in God is Christ” or simply “God is Christ”—which, incidentally, is the Book of Mormon’s understanding. In the Scottish Rite, the Word, or Logos, is among the greatest philosophical and cosmological mysteries. That grand patriarch of the Scottish Rite, Albert Pike, for example, devoted a substantial portion of his mammoth Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry to the issue of the “Word in God,” making extensive use of the cabala, or Jewish occult literature.23 If my translation is correct, it may be more than accidental that the text accords with the quintessential lesson of the Master, or Third Degree of the Scottish Rite, that “the Word is in God” (p. 98). If the Smith family tracing board is of some mystical Masonic derivation, this might explain the creative departures based on the Royal Arch or York Rite that possibly derive from something in the cabala. As to the rest of the parchment, what appear to be a compass, two magic circles to the northeast and southwest, and an unorthodox pentagram at the bottom right-hand corner have an occult connection—which proves helpful in deciphering some of the blotchier Hebrew and English writing. The character

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resembling a 4 atop it all could be just that, the numeral 4. A stylized number 4 is the sign of Jupiter (Smith’s planet, it so happens, as he was born in December). Francis Barrett’s 1801 work The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer; Being a Complete System of Occult Philosophy furnishes more than enough assistance in sorting out the meaning behind the more arcane elements of the Smith family tracing board.24 The magic circles seem more or less the sort meant to ward off evil spirits or conjure spirits to some sublime end or purpose. The compasslike set of steep isosceles triangles in the middle bears the name of Raphael, written in English and dead center. The Hebrew letters aleph, daleth, nun, and yod directly underneath spell adoni, that is, Lord. If the first Hebrew letter in the string to the right is a shin, then what follows might be shem’el, that is, “the name of God.” The southerly triangle of the compass reads qoph, daleth, mem, aleph, lamed (qdm’l), from the Hebrew root qdm, and thus “ancient God” or “God is ancient.”25 This may be a variant of “Adam Kadmon,” the name of the “Primal or First Man” in the cabala, which Pike contends “might be called by the name Tetragrammaton.”26 The daleth, nun, and yod on the left are the last three letters in adoni. However, they appear directly underneath aleph, lamed, aleph, pe (a phonetic spelling of aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet?), and perhaps A(leph)doni, as in LORD is intended. The ha and resh to the left and the ha, resh, and waw at the top could be har, as in “hill or mound,” or the title for the patriarchs, or the numbers 4, 5, and 6 (if the resh is instead a daleth).27 Four is also a Masonic number, the tetrad of Pythagoras and a sacred number in the Fifth Degree of the Scottish Rite, that of the Perfect Master. Masonic encyclopedist Robert I. Clegg explains: “In many nations of antiquity the name of God consists of four letters, as the Adad, of the Syrians, the Amum of the Egyptians, the Qeos of the Greeks, the Deus of the Romans, and preeminently the Tetragrammaton or four-lettered name of the Jews.”28 This lends credence to my translation of the Greek atop the Smith family tracing board. It may also explain why there are four pentagons, the pentagon being a figure in the Thirty-second Degree of the Scottish Rite (the Camp of the Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret) (2:762). Indeed, the somewhat droopy pentagon at the bottom left is Pythagorean (a mystical work of analytical geometry), bearing no resemblance to the magical pentagons in Barrett. In the middle are the Hebrew word for Lord, adonai, and the word Te-tra-gram-ma-ton (the English for the Divine name) divided into five equal parts. Directly above the head of what appears to be a bird (possibly a dove?) are the initials I. H. S. They, too, are Masonic—extremely and undeniably so: I.H.S. is the sacred monogram of the Knights Templar, short for in hoc signo, “by this sign shalt thou (conquer),”

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the motto of the American branch of the order.29 The four crosses to the left are Templar or possibly Maltese (1:254) (The little Egyptian Crux Ansata is another conspicuous ritual furnishing of the Knights Templar and the Rose Croix of the Scottish Rite [1:256]). This leaves a bird at the bottom and a stylized cross of some occult kind in what appears to be an egg in the top left-hand corner. Perhaps the winged creature is simply one of the angels in ceremonial magic. Given the thick overlay of Royal Arch and Templar/Scottish insignia uncovered thus far, however, something Masonic rather than occult seems more likely, such as a dove, a prominent symbol in an honorary degree in the United States only known as the Ark and Dove.30 The dove is also the emblem of so-called androgynous lodges (those that include women, such as the French Knights of the Dove [1:533]). The triple cross inside the egg-shaped circle is probably both magical and Masonic in derivation. A triple cross serves as the signature of a Sovereign Grand Commander, or Thirty-Third-Degree Mason (1:5). The egg was an important symbol throughout antiquity, of course, and it is also of interest in the more arcane Scottish Rite. The symbolism of the egg in the esoteric or higher degrees in Masonry runs the gamut: it is a symbol of the magi, the Egyptians, good and evil, philosophy, the luminous God, the Supreme Intelligence in the World, the concavity of the celestial sphere enclosing all things, the world and its spherical envelope, the double power or the active and passive, and the male and female principles.31 “Agla,” at the bottom, is from the cabala and appears in the Master, or Third Degree of the Scottish Rite, as another name for God, there being three all told—Yahweh, Adonai, and Agla (p. 104). It seems entirely possible that the golden plates and the Smith family tracing board are one and the same. The only other clue as to what their characters may have looked like, written in so-called Reformed Egyptian, is an early advertisement (see figure 12). Its text might tell us a great deal if we could only read it, assuming the characters are not in some random order—a mere listing of an alphabet or cipher intended to have meaning only to certain readers in the know. When examined through the eyes of academe, the advertisement seems to consist of Greek and Latin, along with the odd Hebrew character, all of it written upside down or backward. But they may be a variant of the Masonic cipher known as the Enochian alphabet. In the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Degrees of the Scottish Rite, Freemasons are said to have accompanied the Christian princes to the Holy Land, fighting by their sides. There they discovered an ancient text written in Syriac and Enochian. Syriac, yes! But Enochian? Might Enochian be the Reformed Egyptian of the Book of Mormon shown

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  Early Mormon Broadside: A “Correct Copy” of the Book of Mormon Characters James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret, ), p. .

  Enochian Alphabet Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, ), :.

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  Masonic Alphabet Demeter Gerard Roger Serbanesco, Histoire de la Franc Maçonnerie universelle: Son rituel—son symbolisme (Paris: Editions intercontinentales, ), :.

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in figure 12? The resemblance to the Enochian alphabet, courtesy of one Masonic encyclopedist (see figure 13), is striking, to say the least! To suppose that the Book of Mormon characters reproduce the Enochian alphabet seems simplistic, however, for they are undoubtedly symbolic. In fact, it is possible to hazard a preliminary educated guess regarding the first three lines, a grab bag of Masonic emblems, Royal Arch and Scottish Rite ciphers, and, perhaps not surprisingly, some of the signs of the zodiac and the planets. It should come as no great surprise that the characters are almost entirely symbolic, the odd alphabetic ciphers being abbreviations for the Deity, the Christ as Logos, the Smiths, and, of course, young Joseph Jr., as a Mason of Christian and occult sensibility with a hidden adoptive agenda. But without the key—indeed the Mormon prophet himself—we can only hope to transliterate rather than translate per se.32 Should we ever find the golden plates and succeed in translating them for ourselves, the end result would no doubt prove a great disappointment. The text would likely not read anything like the English of the Book of Mormon. However, this could be because our sense of the written word and Smith’s could not be more different. Whether he squeezed his 588-page narrative out of a single family tracing board or the golden plates proper contained no more information than early advertisements for the Book of Mormon, there seems more than enough written text for a man of such aural-oral talent to spin a yarn of vast proportion. There is a word in Masonry for adepts like Smith. Under the heading “Oral Instruction,” one Masonic encyclopedist discusses what he calls the “Bright Mason”: a student of Masonic esoterica, the so-called mysteries, who learns without the aid of books or written materials. The means by which such individuals acquire knowledge is thought to involve a purer form of communication and of passing down the wisdom of the ages from generation to generation. “Such of the legends as were communicated orally,” Oliver is quoted as saying, would be entitled to the greatest degree of credence, while those that were committed to the custody of symbols, which, it is possible, many of the collateral legends would be, were in great danger of perversion, because the truth could only be ascertained by those persons who were entrusted with the secrets of their interpretation. And if the symbols were of doubtful character, and carried a double meaning, as many of the Egyptian hieroglyphics of a subsequent age actually did, the legends which they embodied might sustain very considerable alteration in sixteen or seventeen hundred years, although passing through very few hands.33

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  Rose-Croix Apron with Password “Pax Vobis” in Code Erich J. Lindner, The Royal Art Illustrated (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, ), p. .

     represents a compromise between employing a pure oral transmission and breaking with esoteric convention and putting knowledge down on paper. Or the reference to Reformed Egyptian could be an allusion to the Degree of Scottish Elder Master and Knight of Saint Andrew, the Fourth Degree of Ramsay, which also goes by the name of the Reformed Rite. In any case, so the Mormon story begins, on a fateful spring morning in 1820, a young New York farm boy entered a grove of trees near his home to offer up his two cents on what could be done to avert disaster and save the republic as he conceived it. And after summoning the Lord of heaven and earth to his backyard, he resolved to attempt something visionary entirely his own.

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was joseph smith a mason?

Smith matters permanently, to America and the world, because of the fierce alchemy he underwent. —Harold Bloom, The American Religion

    Mormonism in the first decade of its development (the 1830s) on the side of Evangelical Antimasonry. (Apologists reject this, but for the wrong reasons—their rejoinder is a desperate attempt to buttress the book against reductionism of any kind.1 Anthony W. Ivins is a case in point.)2 Book of Mormon critic Dan Vogel quotes the financier of the first edition of the Book of Mormon, Martin Harris, who described it as an “Anti-masonick Bible.”3 (Harris served on the local Palmyra anti-Masonic vigilance committee before gravitating to Mormonism. His wife, Lucy, took umbrage to his shift in faith, burning the first 116 pages of the manuscript in a vain attempt to save her husband and their home, in the opinion of one LDS seminarian. When the Book of Mormon failed to sell, her worst nightmare came true, and they lost the farm.)4 W. W. Phelps, another prominent early Mormon and newspaperman, edited the anti-Masonic Phoenix, of Ontario, New York, before his conversion.5 Vogel cites these and other examples to underscore early Mormonism’s anti-Masonic bias. In his view, “it is a serious mistake to discount the virtually unanimous view of those in Jacksonian America that the Book of Mormon was describing and warning them of the political dangers of Freemasonry. If those in Jacksonian America were wrong about the book’s anti-Masonic politics, then the book fell far short of its intended goal (of plainness) since virtually everyone misunderstood its message” (p. 19). Fawn M. Brodie was among the first to argue that the Book of Mormon should be seen as anti-Masonic. As she explains, “Joseph Smith was writing the

H

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Book of Mormon in the thick of a political crusade that gave backwards New York, hitherto politically stagnant and socially déclassé, a certain prestige and glory. And he quickly introduced in the book the theme of the Gadianton band, a secret society whose oaths for fraternal protection were bald parallels of Masonic oaths, and whose avowed aim was the overthrow of the democratic Nephite government.”6 Masonic apologists agree; S. H. Goodwin is one example.7 Another, James C. Bilderback, takes for granted that “the early books of the Mormon Bible definitely renounce the Masonic Brotherhood.”8 Eyewitness accounts and even learned Masonic opinion are not quite unanimous, however. In 1831, for example, non-Mormon Eber D. Howe published an article in the Painesville Telegraph accusing Mormons of being “republican jacks,” a term for Masonic sympathizers.9 Phelps, though described as an antiMasonic newspaperman, was nevertheless considered to be a friend of Masonry by such prominent defenders of the order as Heinrich Opperman. In Opperman’s magnum opus, nine volumes in all, a fiction entitled Hundred Years: 1770–1870, he describes a brief layover in Salt Lake City by three Freemasons who report that the reason for Mormonism’s “borrowings from Freemasonry” is “their main apostle, W. W. Phelps,” allegedly a student of Freemason scholar Karl Christian Friedrich Krause of Gottingen.10 The characterization of Phelps as a disciple of German Freemasonry is intriguing but patently wrong. So why did so many Masons—Royal Arch devotees in particular—convert to Mormonism in the early years? Mormon historian of Masonry E. Cecil McGavin notes that “many of the Mormon brethren had been admitted to Masonry before they joined the church.”11 Hyrum Smith, Newell K. Whitney, Heber C. Kimball, John C. Bennet, George Miller, Lucius N. Scovil, Elijah Fordham, John Smith, Austin Cowles, Noah Rogers, and James Adams—all members of Smith’s inner circle—were Freemasons. Of his Masonic vows, Kimball wrote, “I have been as true as an angel from the Heavens to the covenants I made in the lodge at Victor.”12 Many such Mormon Masons suffered no pangs of guilt vis-àvis their erstwhile fraternal predilections.13 Some joined because they saw in the movement and its prophet a potential ally of Masonry. Adams, a slaveholder, joined in hopes of bringing Mormons into the Masonic fold. Any reticence on Smith’s part stemmed from his conviction that the introduction of Freemasonry among the Saints was more duplication than contradiction. Masonic historian Mervin B. Hogan agrees that Smith planned “to organize a competing coexistent Masonic Grand Lodge in Illinois.”14 How far back such plans went and whether the Book of Mormon stood in the way of, or paved the way for, a Mormon-Masonic rapprochement are the real questions.

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Hogan, in an 1980 publication, Mormonism and Freemasonry: The Illinois Episode, argues that “the secret society of the Book of Mormon cannot be mistaken as, or construed to be, Freemasonry by anyone other than a totally uninformed person who is misled by the common but erroneous practice of designating oath bound organizations as secret societies.”15 “It must be readily acknowledged that Mormonism and Freemasonry,” he continues, “are so intimately and inextricably interwoven and interrelated that the two can never be dissociated” (p. 289). According to Hogan, moreover, “Freemasonry was a subject with which the Prophet felt personally thoroughly acquainted with,” and “the origin, growth, and rise of Joseph Smith’s modern phenomenon of Mormonism took place in the congenial, intimate domestic atmosphere of a family home which enjoyed a Masonic influence” (p. 268).16 Smith’s story, Brooke also agrees, “was deeply entangled in the popular hermeticism of the divining culture,” Freemasonry being an important point of entry.17 Smith had relatives in Vermont who were Masons. His father and older brother were Masons. There were two Royal Arch Chapters in Palmyra, and thirty-six Masonic lodges in the immediate vicinity.18 Oliver Cowdery, Smith’s chief scribe, was also a card-carrying Royal Arch Mason, according to one contemporary source.19 Perhaps Smith became a Mason in 1830 and kept it a secret. In the wake of the Morgan affair, being too candid about one’s ties to the order could prove problematic. No record of such an initiation (before 1842) has ever been found, but the New York record is silent concerning the membership of some of the order’s most distinguished Masons. There are also reasons to suspect that when Smith became a Master Mason in 1842 at the lodge in Nauvoo, Illinois, it was in the nature of a resumption of duties rather than an investiture. He was raised to the sublime degree of a Master Mason only two days after petitioning the lodge, for example.20 The shortness of that initiation may constitute enough circumstantial evidence of prior knowledge of and sympathy for the cause of manhood, if not membership per se. Masonic law states categorically that only after a minimum of “one month’s service” as an Entered Apprentice and the same as a Fellow Craft can one be raised to the level of Master Mason.21 Not only the rituals and oaths but the lectures, odes, scriptural passages, Masonic paraphrases, and symbolism must be committed to memory. The thirty-day probationary period normally allotted was barely time to master the essentials of a single degree. It is possible, however, that the 1842 initiation was in fact an honorary ceremony. Albert G. Mackey explains that honorary membership is “conferred only as a mark of distinction on Brethren of great talents or merits, who have been of service, by their labors and their writ-

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ings, to the fraternity . . . and amounts to no more than a testimonial of the esteem and respect entertained by the Lodge.”22 As Ivan J. Barrett says, “Joseph Smith . . . was promoted three degrees practically ‘upon sight,’ a rare procedure reserved for kings, presidents, and potentates.”23 The Nauvoo Lodge was of York lineage, Grand Master of Illinois Abraham Jonas officiating at an out-door installation ceremony held on 15 March 1842 and despite strong opposition from (York) Masons (Scottish Rite Masonry not as yet a fixture that far west) in neighboring Quincy. By all accounts, the irregular (speedy) manner in which Nauvoo’s Masons added to their numbers, forced Jonas to withdraw his support, issuing an injunction to cease all such labor. One reason for the ensuing suspension was the membership of John C. Bennett, who, it seems, had fallen out of favor. (He was also partial to the higher degrees of the Scottish and Egyptian Rites.) The rapidity with which investitures took place accords with the practice of modern Scottish Rite Masons, which in hindsight Mormons were putting to good use. It is revealing, for example, that Smith was accused of establishing a women’s lodge, the Relief Society. Given that he waited most of his life before finally gaining entrance, the experience proved disappointing, since he proceeded with the construction of the massive Nauvoo temple, where an even more sublime order of priesthood and set of adoptive rituals (of clandestine Scottish and Egyptian derivation) would come to fruition. The Mormon prophet, we know, spent his formative years in perhaps the only Masonic apprenticeship open to someone of his age and class: that of village “money digger.” Most of his family also dabbled in the occult, even his mother, Lucy Mack Smith. As D. Michael Quinn has shown, the Smiths blurred the lines between magic and religion, faith and science, despite the best efforts of the local clergy to dissuade them.24 However, as my attempt at translating the Smith family tracing board suggests, they were a little too conversant in the iconography and grand omnific verbiage of Templarism to be seen as mere magi. Winning the faculty of Abrac, or the use of magical incantations such as “abracadabra,” one of the magical practices exercised by the Smiths, appears in Masonic sources as part of the higher liturgies. And although apparently magical furnishings in the home suggest that the Smiths practiced magic for its own sake and that Freemasonry was a sidebar,25 some of the empirical evidence for the Smiths (root and branch) as practitioners of ceremonial magic is strikingly Masonic. For example, that the senior Smith was a known “rodsman” would have made him a Lodge Deacon, since the rod is the Masonic insignia of that office. In Pennsylvania, the rod that Lodge Deacons carried was also called a “wand,” tipped with gold no less, which they displayed on parade (2:863–864).

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There were several kinds. One bent at the top, resembling a snake, an allusion to the story in the Old Testament of Aaron, Moses’ mouthpiece, who turns his rod into a serpent and back again. The object Joseph Sr. carried with him might also have been a Masonic divining rod (a pedum in Masonic parlance), the insignia of a Royal Arch Master or Moderator. “The rod of the Rose Croix,” Clegg explains, “is straight, white, like a wand, and yet may be used as a helping or leaning staff ” (1:289). Joseph Sr.’s ceremonial dagger, mentioned in Quinn,26 which one might use to draw magic circles and conjure spirits, could also have had Masonic (Templar and Scottish) significance, as a sidearm denoting a particular office.27 Joseph Jr. owned the cane shown in figure 17a, ostensibly to steady himself (he had a limp); however, it may have also served as a badge of Masonic office. Not only does it resemble a Masonic divining rod, or “pedum,” but the insignia on the side (which Quinn tells us is simply astrological) depicts a Templar crown and what appears to be a Royal Arch. Another important piece of empirical evidence, collected in the course of Quinn’s exhaustive discussion of Smith’s debt to the magic worldview, is a medallion showing a dove clutching a twig in its beak. This too, is Masonic, another emblem of the office of Deacon. The real question, however, concerns Smith’s knowledge and opinion of Masonry in the early years of the church he founded in 1830 that, according to many, was mainly intended for Christian Primitivists. At first simply calling it the Church of Christ in these days, Smith changed the name a mere four years later to the Church of the Latter-day Saints, which in 1838 became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.28 It has always been tempting to see in the designation “Latter-day Saint” an afterclap of Puritanism (to borrow from Emerson); however, it seems altogether Catholic and medieval, the church that Smith founded in April 1830 being both a church of Jesus Christ and a Commandery of Knights Templar or Medieval Latter-day Saints. The new name ought to have made his Templar intentions quite clear, to any, that is, with (Masonic) understanding. Zion’s Camp, an armed march of Mormons under Smith in 1834, which after much dissension and even a plague of cholera suffered the ultimate humiliation of having to relinquish arms before a single shot could be fired in retaliation for mob violence perpetrated against fellow Saints (pp. 277–294), can be seen as a latter-day, Templar-like crusade in both word and deed. “Camp” has a very specific Masonic usage, the name for a Consistory of Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret, that is, the Thirty-second Degree of the Scottish Rite. The tracing board and apron of the degree include an imaginary Masonic camp.29

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  Divining Rod, or Pedum Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, ), :.

  Closeups of Joseph Smith Jr.’s Serpent Cane D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, ), figs. , . By permission of photographer D. Michael Quinn

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 a Joseph Smith Jr.’s Dove Medallion D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, ), fig. . By permission of photographer D. Michael Quinn

 b The English Templar Deacon Robert Crucifix Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorston, 1911), 3: 272b.

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There are also a few literary clues to Smith’s early Masonic self-understanding and hidden Templar agenda—or not so hidden, in the case of Zion’s Camp—that seem to have escaped detection. Enoch is one of the code names he went by—which is Masonic in itself.30 While this is not remarkable for someone raised in a Templar home and partial to the advanced degrees and esoterica synonymous with the Scottish Rite, it could also, of course, be simply biblical in origin. Gazelam, however, another of Smith’s code names, is not a proper name that appears in the Bible. First appearing in connection to Smith in a revelation on the establishment of a storehouse for the poor, its origin is anyone’s guess. Still, it bears a striking resemblance to Gibalim, a Masonic corruption of the Hebrew Giblim. For Masons, it can only mean “stone squarer,”31 although the classical Hebrew meaning is “a concrete boundary marker,” whereas in Talmudic sources it is used in connection with mixing with lime or kneading (as bread).32 For Smith’s sake, one hopes that Gazelam is simply a corruption of Gibalim and hence code designating the Mormon prophet as one of Solomon’s latter-day stonecutters. For Gazelam could also be translated as “robber”: in Talmudic writings, the root gzl refers to one who “takes without paying.”33 Indeed, some of Smith’s dearest followers would accuse him of ecclesiastical and financial malpractice, the first such challenge to his leadership coming on the heels of Zion’s Camp. That said, and in all fairness to the Mormon prophet, the only sense in which he was a robber might relate to matters Masonic and ritualistic. And one hastens to add that his mythopoetic larcenies are like Robin Hood’s: he might be accused of stealing from the rich in order to give to the poor. His so-called First Vision, as I discuss in the following chapter, can be seen as the testimony of a Royal Arch Mason and/or Christian Knight rather than that of some disgruntled Evangelical outsider. Consider, for example, the Masonic origins of Charles G. Finney’s epiphany. We know that Finney was a Master Mason—he had joined a local Connecticut lodge in 1813, moving to New York in 1818 and affiliating himself with a lodge there—and a Masonic secretary in good standing, among other things. Finney would be forced to choose between his newfound Evangelical piety and erstwhile fraternalism a year or so before the Morgan affair, taking a harder and harder line against the order as time passed. As Carnes has shown, however, his conversion account is rife with Masonic analogue.34 This may explain why it took him so long to renounce his Masonic oaths, only publishing a retraction—albeit scathing—in 1869, in a work entitled The Character, Claims, and Practical Workings of Freemasonry.35 And if Finney could be a closet Mason, then why not Smith, too? Both men had a

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vision of the Almighty in a grove of trees near their homes that delivered them from the valley of the shadow of spiritual death; both stories owe a debt of some kind to Masonic piety and ritual. Finney would come out strongly against the very society of men who had brought him into the light. Smith was no less critical of the Masonic standing order but proceeded with a very different end in mind. Rather than jumping from the Masonic frying pan into the Evangelical fire, Smith attempted a revitalization of Masonry (a synthesis along Royal Arch/KnightsTemplar and proto-Scottish lines), becoming a Master Mason (of some stripe) in 1842 and then instituting an androgynous lodge of his own (of the radical European and French kind) in the succeeding months. This doesn’t alter the fact that it still seems most unlikely that Smith was a Mason before 1842—though not through lack of trying. For starters, he walked with a slight limp, the result of an intrusive bone operation in his youth. This alone disqualified him to join his father and brother as their Masonic equal: Smith did not quite measure up to the fraternity’s idea of a real man. The reigning Masonic monitor of the day states: “Lawful Material to the Mystic Temple of Masonry must consist of free-born, of lawful age (twenty-one years and upward is the American usage); mentally, morally, and physically perfect. . . . Unlawful Material,” it further states, “consists of females; minors; slave born persons; those whose minds are impaired by age; irreligious libertines (scoffers at religious sentiment); atheists; idiots and deranged persons. To these are added the immoral; the lecherous; the disobedient to law, human and divine; the indiscreet in confidential communications; the halt, maim [sic], and blind; the eunuch; the parsimonious; the contumacious; the unintelligent; the brawler, and the violent.”36 Such strictures ensured that “the applicant for Masonic light shall have the senses, members, and powers as will enable him to give and to receive all the means of Masonic recognition, according to the strictest Masonic forms” (p. 276). One anonymous black ball was all it took for a candidate to be out forever.37 The Mormon prophet had little recourse but find a backdoor (if not a trapdoor) into the lodge of his choice. On the other hand, it does seem possible that his father and brother, already in the order, might have been able to convince their fellow lodgers to turn a blind eye to Smith’s bum leg. His work as a local money digger (largely a labor of necessity) did not speak well for him, either, especially since in 1826 a Bainbridge justice of the peace convicted him of disorderly conduct and found him guilty of being an “impostor.”38 With a criminal record, Smith had no chance of becoming a Mason as the order blackballs known offenders—unless, of course, father and brother were able to call in a favor or two more.

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As a brief aside, there may be more to the use of the word “impostor” to describe Smith and what he tried to pull on Josiah Stowel, the farmer who brought him up on charges and yet had hired him to find buried treasure. “Impostor” has a Masonic meaning and usage. It is used to describe those who, quoting Clegg, “never having been initiated, yet endeavor to pass themselves off for regular Freemasons, or Freemasons who, having been expelled or suspended from the Order, seek to conceal the fact and still claim the privileges of members in good standing.”39 It is possible that there was a Masonic component to the Bainbridge trial, that Stowel hauled Smith on the carpet for impersonating a Templar, not for money digging as such. “Charlatan” is another common pejorative with a specific Masonic meaning: “one who seeks by a display of pompous ceremonial, and often by claims to supernatural power, to pervert the Institution of Freemasonry to the acquisition of mere gain, or the gratification of a paltry ambition” (1:195). Was Smith’s conviction an example to other would-be Masonic impostors and charlatans? Durfee Chase, a contemporary of Smith’s, a Palmyra Royal Arch Mason, and another money digger, was expelled in 1825 for “unmasonic conduct.” Brooke speculates that Chase was expelled for “divulging the ritual secrets of the Royal Arch to the money-digging circles,” perhaps to his sister Sally in particular.40 The Mormon prophet and the entire Chase family of Palmyra, especially Sally, argued over a “brown seer stone” that Smith discovered on their property while digging a well and to which he credited the discovery of the golden plates. Sally and other local treasure hunters thought Smith ought to share the wealth. Smith had other plans, publishing his “translation” as the Book of Mormon and then returning the plates to their original hiding place at the behest of an angelic being named Moroni (or possibly Nephi) who had been instrumental in the whole process.41 That he rejected pleas to use the plates for personal gain suggests that at worst he was guilty of exercising poor judgment in the company he sometimes kept and in the work he was sometimes obliged to take (more or less as he tells it). To add to obstacles standing between him and Masonic standing, Smith turned twenty-one (of Masonic age) at the height of the anti-Masonic controversy and scandal surrounding the disappearance of renegade Royal Arch Mason Captain William Morgan. The Morgan affair gave Evangelicals all the fuel they needed to bring down their (Royal) arch rivals as the Second Great Awakening trudged on. Most lodges found it easier to close than to respond in kind. In the state of New York, membership fell from 30,000 to 300. Vermont and Illinois Masonry was decimated; not a single lodge remained open

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when all was said and done. The brethren met in absolute secret in a futile attempt to keep the movement from dying out completely, the 1840s marking the first real attempts at recovery and resumption of normal Masonic activities.42 But by then, everything had changed in favor of the emergent Evangelical consensus. The precise day, month, and year when Smith should have become a Mason, he discovered the golden plates (instead?). He would put the Masonic legends of the metal plates of Enoch and long lost book of the Law to good use, perhaps in hopes of proving wrong the Masonic elites who had tried to keep him down. Yet, as Robert Freke Gould suggests in his multivolume Masonic history, Smith’s achievement was certain to prove problematic all the same: Foolish and unnecessary as it will always appear to destroy the original beautiful simplicity of the Craft, the great evil of these innovations lies in their destruction of an important principle. Freemasonry is founded upon the perfect equality of all its members. . . . But in almost every one of these new systems, with scarcely an exception, the governing power is autocratic and irresponsible . . . those of the lower classes have no voice whatsoever in the administration of their affairs or in the election of their rulers. This one consideration alone precludes these systems from ever being entitled to call themselves Masonic. They are not and never can be Freemasonry. They are simply separate societies, all of whose members happened to be Freemasons.43

Still, Smith had little choice, all things considered, but to invent a Masonry of his own in the wake of the Morgan affair, a thesis that has much going for it when one considers that other young Masonic prospects at the time did precisely that—one of them the father of American ethnography, no less, Lewis Henry Morgan. One biographer hit the nail on the head when he described Lewis (no relation to William) Morgan as not “a born ethnologist” but “made one by a secret society.”44 Morgan hoped to transform a literary secret society of which he was already a member into a new branch of Royal Arch Masonry, adding Indian legend to the ritual of manhood. Morgan’s father, Jedidiah, was a prominent Mason. Worshipful Master of the Scipio lodge, he contributed significantly to the building of the Royal Arch temple in Aurora, New York (only thirty-two miles from Palmyra). He died the same year William Morgan disappeared. Lewis, eight at the time, would not come of Masonic age for another thirteen years. But when the time arrived for him to begin his ascent up the ranks of manhood, as Carnes explains, he “could not have joined his father’s

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  An Ancient Lodge of Freemasonry “Before the erection of temples our ancient brethren held their lodges on a high hill or in a low vale, the better to observe the approach of cowans and eavesdroppers ascending or descending.” Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 1:52b.

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Masonic lodge, which ceased meeting during the Antimasonic uproar” (p. 96). And so he did the next best and only thing, establishing in 1840 his own “Indian lodge,” which went by the name of the Order of the Iroquois and proposed the knitting of individuals into a single civil and social system based on thinly veiled Masonic principles.45 Morgan even invited esteemed ethnologists and friends of his father—William Leete Stone, a Mason and the author of The Life and Times of Red Jacket, and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft—to dialogue on the substance of his Masonic-inspired reclamation of Indian spirituality. He lost heart, though, in part because his studies seemed to take the place of Masonry. Adoption by the Hawk clan in 1846 did little to disabuse him of academic ambition. Not only would he disband the Order of Iroquois, but he vainly attempted to conceal his role in its creation from his colleagues and the public in general. Morgan’s Order of Iroquois gave rise to numerous Masonic ritual celebrations of Native American character, a stream of male ritual celebrations of the “primitive men’s house.”46 One such was the Improved Order of Red Men, founded in 1834, that began as a working-class drinking society but later became a male temperance movement that hoped to attract a better class of people into the organization. It grew to some 350,000 strong by 1900, with annual receipts in excess of one million dollars. Carnes explains that the order’s “Adoption degree implied that the life of the paleface had come to an end. As a Red Man he would chart a more ‘serene’ course through life” (p. 102). The parallels between Morgan and Smith are many. Not unlike Morgan, who abandoned his nascent Masonry for the greater light of academic study, Smith, too, underwent a kind of personal alchemy, transmuting from rural money digger to (Masonic) prophet of God. Both men were intent on keeping their Masonic activities a secret lest these prove problematic in the eyes of their peers. Of course, both published works of Native history. But where Morgan’s League of the Iroquois is an achievement befitting a scholar, Smith’s Book of Mormon is the work of a seer and revelator of unshakable Masonic faith and vision.

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dreaming masonry: getting the story plumb

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. —Joel 2:27 “Can they [the Mormons] raise the dead?” No, nor can any other people that now lives, or ever did live. But God can raise the dead, through man as an instrument. —Joseph Smith Jr.

   Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, Jan Shipps argues that the story of Mormonism “began with the discovery of a book whose contents told Saints in the nineteenth century what had happened to the people of God who came to America before them in much the same way that the priests’ discovery in the recesses of the temple of a book said to have been written by Moses told the people in King Josiah’s reign about those who came to Israel before them.”1 She goes on to show how all the major events in the Mormon story recall the biblical narrative: the restoration of the Aaronic priesthood; the construction of a temple in Kirtland modeled after that of Solomon; Smith’s death at the hands of an angry mob, reminiscent of Jeremiah’s martyrdom; the crossing of the Mississippi and the trek to Utah, essentially a modern-day Israelite crossing of the Red Sea and journey through the wilderness; the arrival in Salt Lake City, an American land of promise and polygamy, a recapitulation of the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Absolutely! That said, the biblical narrative may not be the whole story. Smith and Finney tell their conversion stories using the same Masonic insignia. Retiring to a grove of trees and in the act of prayer, the men find themselves enveloped in darkness; neither could speak until a bright light burst on the scene and released them from bondage. Smith recalls coming to his senses

I

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  The Raising of a Master Mason Erich J. Lindner, The Royal Art Illustrated (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1976), p. 35.

sometime later, flat on his back and staring upward to heaven. One may compare this to the initiation of the Master Mason: blindfolded and not permitted to speak, the initiate must lie flat on his back and await the moment of release when the Grand Master takes him by the hand, lifts him up in an embrace known as the five points of fellowship, and, removing the blindfold, whispers the great mystery (the Grand Omnific Word) in his ear—hence the need for absolute discretion and secrecy (see figure 20).2 Darkness has a special place in Masonry. As Masonic authority Albert Mackey observes: “Freemasonry has restored Darkness to its proper place, as a state of preparation.” The aspirant, he explains, “was always shrouded in darkness as a preparatory step to the reception of the full light of knowledge. . . . The release of the aspirant from solitude and darkness was called the act of regeneration, and he was said to be . . . raised from the dead.”3 A popular 1762 English exposé that appeared in America between 1790 and 1826 outlines the ritual and its impact on the aspirant. The blindfold, it explains, is intended to “throw” the mind of the candidate “into great perplexity.” When

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it is removed, the effect is dazzling: the brethren having formed “a circle round him,” the “glitter of their swords, and fantastic appearance” of their “white aprons” creates “great surprise.”4 The object is for the candidate to gain “knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” and partake of the “divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (pp. 16–17). The initiate, however, represents “one of the greatest men in the world, viz, our Grand Master Hiram,” King Solomon’s chief architect and Master Craftsman, not Jesus Christ per se. The Master Mason induction ceremony originates in the story of the murder of Hiram Abiff at the hands of three renegade fellow Craft Masons (Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum).5 Refusing to divulge the secrets of Masonry before the completion of the temple in Jerusalem, Hiram pays the ultimate price. His murderers, not unlike Cain in the Bible, feign ignorance of their brother’s whereabouts, hiding the corpse “on the side of a hill.”6 They abscond but are soon discovered, their cries of anguish giving them away. There is some measure of honor, as the manner of their execution is dramatic: their tongues are ripped out, their hearts torn from their naked breasts, their bodies severed in twain, bowels burnt to ashes, etc., etc.—all at their own request. Following the grizzly spectacle, Solomon institutes a new ritual based on the life, death, and so-called resurrection of Master Mason Hiram Abiff (his badly decomposed body was lifted from a shallow grave and returned to Jerusalem in one piece). The concluding male embrace takes its name from the five points of fellowship: hand in hand, foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, the left hand supporting the back. Another grand sign is adopted, consisting of the raising of one’s hands and exclaiming “O Lord, my God!” (p. 35). The secret grand word is then communicated to the aspirant in the loving embrace of his new Master. Smith’s earliest recitation of the First Vision (1832) alludes to the Masonic emblems of sun, moon, and stars—the great luminaries that move under the watchful care of the All-Seeing Eye. “I looked upon the sun,” he writes, “the glorious luminary of the earth and also the moon rolling in their majesty through the heavens and also the stars shining in their courses and the earth upon which I stood.”7 The musical paraphrase, or ode, for the Master Mason degree speaks of sun, moon, and “planet’s light,” the latter referring to both stars and comets. Smith’s characterization of the earth as one of the heavenly luminaries can be seen as an extrapolation based on the ambiguous language in Masonic ritual: a single reference to planetary light might well lead one to include the earth in the same category as stars and comets.8

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  The Religions of the World “Masonry softens the asperities of conflicting opinions.” Bernard Picart engraving, reproduced in Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 1:30b.

Smith credits one Bible verse in particular, James 1:5, with causing him to go to his Creator for private counsel. Smith’s object in going to his Lord, his query, and the Deity’s response all have a Masonic tone. “My object in going to enquire of the Lord,” Smith writes, “was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. . . . I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong.”10 James adjures any who lack wisdom to

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“ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given.” It may be more than mere coincidence that the same passage serves as prologue for the Royal Arch Degree. “My son,” the Orator exclaims at the beginning of the initiation ceremony, “if thou wilt receive my words, and hide my commandments; so that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thy heart to understanding; if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice unto understanding; if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hidden treasures, then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God; for the Lord giveth wisdom; out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.”9 James 1:5 is given special credence in the Knights Templar initiation ritual as well and is read verbatim.11 The first lecture of the Apprentice Degree lauds the virtues of concord. Psalm 133 is read aloud: “Behold, how good and pleasant it is for the brethren to dwell together in unity! . . .” What follows underscores the necessity of unity and harmony: “For there the Lord of light and love, a blessing sent with power. . . . To live in love with hearts sincere, in peace and unity” (p. 20). The aspirant is counseled to avoid the company of factious persons and non-Masonic societies and then sworn to secrecy.12 Likewise, Smith is told not “to join with any of them [but not simply sectarian Evangelical churches]” and then placed under what seems a temporary gag order. “And many other things did he say unto me,” Smith explains, “which I cannot write at this time.”13 As the Mormon prophet tells his story, he apologizes for his adolescent peccadilloes, for “temptations, and mingling with society,” for frequently falling “into many foolish errors” and displaying “the weakness of youth and the corruption [later changed to “foibles”] of human nature” (p. 202). Smith simply claimed to be guilty of too much “Levity” and “Jovial company” inconsistent with his high and holy calling.14 An Apprentice in principle, on his way to becoming a Master Mason with heaven’s blessing, Smith held himself to the highest fraternal moral standards: temperance, fortitude, prudence and justice, morality being “the theory of the first degree.”15 Smith’s visions move indoors at this point, from the sacred grove to his bedroom. This withdrawal to the bedroom can be seen as a Masonic “Chamber of Reflection” scenario, wherein aspirants ponder their eternal salvation in a humble parlor adjacent to the lodge prior to initiation (a gloomy, dark abode, the chamber exacerbated the feelings of despair requisite to advancing to the high and holy station of Royal Arch Mason and Knight Templar). The nocturnal visits of the angel Moroni become the new focus. At this point, the folklore of the higher (indeed highest) ritualistic echelons of American Masonry—

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that of the Royal Arch and Knights Templar Degrees—drives the story. In Royal Arch Masonry, Enoch (not unlike Smith) is said to have “a vision.” The Deity appears to him “in visible shape,” and Enoch is brought to his knees after “pondering how to rescue the human race from their sins and the punishment due to their crimes.” Enoch (like Smith) awakes and immediately goes “in search of the mountain he saw in his vision.” Not unlike the last of the Book of Mormon prophets, Moroni, Enoch constructs a series of vaults “in the bowels in the earth” and deposits “two deltas of purest gold, engraving upon each the mysterious characters,” as well as a “triangular plate of gold.” A “square stone” covers the aperture to the vault.16 Moroni’s attire may be Masonic, his white robe either the “white leather apron” and emblem of purity in Masonry or, more likely, the habit of the ancient Knights Templar—the latter befitting Moroni’s standing. Royal Arch “Captains” wear white and even carry a white banner.17 According to Masonic lore, Hiram’s “workmen” wore a “white garment” (p. 20). That Smith could see (into) Moroni’s bosom may allude to the one bare breast of the Master Mason initiate. In any event, Moroni’s skimpy attire, naked feet, and exposed bosom are consistent with the general drapery of the sublime Master Mason, Royal Arch Captain, and Knight Templar. Moroni’s lectures, which occupy most of the night and part of the next day, are taken largely from the Old Testament—a series of Bible passages that Webb deemed particularly suited to Masonic uses: Malachi 3 and 4, Isaiah 11, and Joel 2.18 The first of these is pregnant with patriarchal possibility, recounting the eschatological Elijah’s role in turning “the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” In Malachi, too, are references to the Second Coming as “like a refiner’s fire,” the purification of the sons of Levi described as an alchemical-like purging of silver and gold. In Isaiah and Joel are prophecies of the gathering of a lost remnant of the house of Israel and a worldwide Pentecost of young men and women just before the great and dreadful day of the Lord. Smith’s First Vision of the Father and Son in the sacred grove and then the nocturnal visitations of Moroni were, of course, not described in writing until many years after the event, the first such accounting in 1832. The official account suggests that Smith started having visions as early as 1820; he would have been only fourteen or fifteen. Three years passed before feelings of inadequacy and intense persecution caused him to seek out a second vision on September 21, 1823—which would make him seventeen at the time. They then oc-

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  The Chamber of Reflection Avery Allyn, A Ritual of Freemasonry (Philadelphia, 1831), reproduced in Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 264.

curred at the end of each year (on September 21 or 22, one presumes) for three more years before the golden plates were entrusted to his care, in 1827, when the Mormon prophet was still only twenty-one. It would be another three years before the Book of Mormon appeared in print. There may be a degree of historical truth in this timeline despite the somewhat picturesque nature of the author’s writing. His story of the annual ministrations of an angelic being (the supernaturalism notwithstanding) could be seen as an admission that he studied under the tutelage of some (Masonic) luminary. (Smith’s belief that angels were corporeal beings who, contrary to popular mythology, did not have wings may be relevant here.)19 That Masonic initiates have a guide whose title suggests something rather otherworldly may also be pertinent, casting new light on the genus, if not the identity, of Moroni.

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One thing is clear: Smith’s account of the First Vision does not contradict this. In 1820 he was old enough to have been a juvenile Knight Templar.20 (Adam Weishaupt’s infamous Bavarian Illuminati had so-called Nursery Degrees: Preparation, Novice, Minerval, and Illuminatus Minor [p. 143].) Perhaps in an attempt to pin a charge of atheism on Smith’s lapel, a neighbor of the Smiths later recalled that young Joseph was most certainly an active member of a local “juvenile debating society,” the sort of male association Palmyra’s snoopier Evangelical element would consider to be impious.21 We do not know nearly enough about the composition of the particular debating club to which Smith belonged; however, as Brooke argues in an essay appropriately entitled “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies,” debating societies and other voluntary associations during the early national period and beyond had a significant Masonic presence and agenda, in some cases serving as a recruiting ground for future adepts.22 Moroni’s role resembles that of a Masonic “spirit guide,” aiding in a Royal Arch-like quest for buried treasure, “the summit and perfection of ancient Masonry.”23 Moreover, that the visitations took place once a year suggests Smith was pulling himself up by his own ritual bootstraps according to the old Scottish understanding—which required a period of not less than one year before graduating to the ensuing degree. Be that as it may, the Royal Arch, Webb writes, “bring[s] to light many of the essentials of the Craft, which were for the space of four hundred and seventy years buried in darkness; and without knowledge of which the Masonic character can not be complete” (p. 121). The lecture part of the degree expounds the destruction of the Solomonic temple, the Babylonian captivity, the return of the exiles to Jerusalem, and their rebuilding of the temple. The aspirant reenacts the discovery of the lost book of the Law that the priests discovered in the recesses of the temple, as recounted in the Bible. “Often they were taken to a corner of the lodge,” Carnes explains, and told to dig among the boards and stones representing the ruins of the first Temple. They would eventually discover a trapdoor, attached to the keystone of an arch, that concealed a darkened chamber below. . . . On the first descent he usually found three squares, which the High Priest said were the jewels of “our ancient Grand Masters—King Solomon; Hiram, King of Tyre; and Hiram Abiff.” On the second descent he discovered a chest “having on its top several mysterious characters.” Inside were a pot of manna, Aaron’s rod, and the “long lost book of the law.” The High Priest also uncovered several pieces of paper that together provided a key to the letters on the outside of the ark of the Temple.24

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  The Royal Arch Quest for the Golden Plate(s) of Enoch David Vinton frontispiece (1816), reproduced in Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 267.

     speaks of treasure brought forth from darkness to light, of a lost book whose “leaves are shining bright.”25 One may compare this to Smith’s 1838 account of the unearthing of the golden plates: “Under a stone of considerable size [keystone], lay the plates deposited in a stone box [vault]. . . . Having removed the earth [rubble of the temple], and obtained a lever which I

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got fixed under the edge of the stone, and with a little exertion raised it up [trapdoor], I looked in and there indeed did I behold the plates [lost Word of God], the Urim and Thummim [means of translating the mysterious characters] and the Breastplate as stated by the messenger.”26 The Mormon prophet would be forced to wait four long years before he could take the plates home and begin the arduous job of translation—not until his twenty-first year (Masonic age) and on September 22 (coincidentally, the date when the American lodges were supposed to open).27 He and scribe Oliver Cowdery would subsequently seek the approval of heaven, receive priesthood authority, first from John the Baptist, the patron saint of Masonry, and then from Peter, James, and John, the latter its other patron saint. With or without the permission or knowledge of the Grand Encampment of the United States, the Book of Mormon set out to prove that Smith and his following had acted in good faith and with Masonic power from on high.  ’    the Book of Mormon includes many of the same Masonic emblems, including a thinly veiled Masonic raising. Nephi, faithful son and devotee of his father, Lehi, nonetheless “groans” under the weight of “sins which so easily beset [him].” The Twenty-third Psalm, King David’s famous lament, is Nephi’s biblical inspiration, promising deliverance from sin. This psalm is a Masonic text of considerable importance and relevance, as it happens, used in the benedictions of the Most Excellent Master and Royal Arch Degrees. One can see why. David’s lying down in green pastures beside still waters, being led in the paths of righteousness for the Deity’s name’s sake, walking through the valley of the shadow of death, a rod and staff his only comfort, finding a table prepared in the face of his enemies echo the allegorical journey of the Freemason in the world. And Nephi’s religious awakening accords with that of the Mason’s journey in the world, the promise of salvation “out of the hands of [his] enemies” predicated on first wandering in the wilderness of one’s moral “afflictions.” Not unlike Smith, Nephi is bound by an oath of secrecy. “And mine eyes hath beheld great things; yea even too great for man,” he explains, “therefore I was bidden that I should not write them” (p. 107). Like the Mormon prophet, Nephi labors under the weight of a less-than-perfect life before his epiphany. Questioning his standing in the eyes of God, he pleads, “O Lord, wilt thou not shut the gates of thy righteousness before me,” and then reassures himself precisely as Smith does, paraphrasing James, “Yea, my God will give me, if I ask not amiss” (pp. 70–71). This is also the plaintive cry of the Entered Apprentice at the door of the lodge as he awaits his turn to

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travel the narrow, ritual path of male moral rectitude. Nephi is greatly burdened by “temptations of the flesh” that “doth easily beset [him].” On this count, too, he is an excellent candidate, erring on the side of moral hypersensitivity. Nephi’s salvation is equated with freedom from the “sins of the flesh,” the hope and prayer of the Entered Apprentice, who also partakes of the “divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”31 The first question the Entered Apprentice must answer is that which Nephi discusses, namely, in whom one should put one’s trust. The correct answer in the Masonic ritual is “in God”—Nephi’s response as it happens. “O Lord, I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever. I will not put my trust,” he goes on, “in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is he that putteth his trust in the arm of flesh.”32 Nephi criticizes his older brothers, Laman and Lemuel. They are immoral men, at bottom. Nephi’s attempt at moral suasion only confirms them in their latent carnality. Laman and Lemuel will grow to hate Nephi and attempt to take his life, forcing him to flee with his family into the wilderness. The people of Nephi build a temple “after the manner of Solomon.” The resemblance between Nephi and Hiram Abiff is uncanny, the Nephite temple in the New World a Masonic revitalization in the nature of the Solomonic recension that gave us Craft or Master Masonry (p. 72). Lehi, Nephi’s pious father, can be seen as the first Grand Master of this ancient American Grand Lodge, although he lives just long enough to give it his blessing. This Masonic investiture and passing of the baton takes place when Lehi gathers his sons together one last time to bear testimony of the truth of the Gospel before he passes on to the next world. One is reminded of Jacob of Old Testament fame, who likewise blessed his posterity as a final act of patriarchal pedagogy (Genesis 49). Lehi’s awakening, thickly inscribed with Masonic emblem, is the “new” Masonic standard.33 He prefaces his remarks with a Masonic-like salutation to the Creator, underscoring his belief in “the greatness of God” and “the righteousness of [the] Redeemer” (p. 62). Belief in the Deity, Lehi opines, is fundamental to human existence, for “if there is no God, we are not, neither the earth: for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore all things just have vanished away” (p. 64). He proceeds to rehearse the details of his wondrous vision of the “Tree of Life” that had kept them out of harm’s way and might change all their lives for the better. Lehi’s visions in the Book of Mormon have too much in common with the dream world of Smith’s father to be mere coincidence. Psychologist and

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historian C. Jess Groesbeck traces the origin of Mormonism to the Smiths’ front step via this dream world.34 Mormonism, he declares, hoped to mend broken hearts and reunite a divided Smith household. However, ever since Lucy Mack Smith recounted the details of the elder Smith’s dreams in a controversial biography entitled Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet and His Progenitors for many Generations, critics have stressed the utterly natural, indeed familial origins of the First Vision and the discovery and translation of the Book of Mormon. This might be the whole story were it not for a second, lessknown fact: Joseph Sr.’s dreams, Lehi’s vision of the Tree of Life, and the socalled Journey of the Freemason in the World seen to be one and the same.35 If so, Mormonism had high hopes of a fraternal reconciliation of a more widespread kind. Indeed, the elder Smith’s night visions come straight from the lodge. We know that he became a member of the Masonic lodge at Canandaigua in 1817, and his (Masonic) dreams followed closely on the heels of his induction. While the plethora of psychohistorical interpretations of Mormonism that accuse his namesake of either extreme narcissism or some bipolar disorder may be quite right, the dream world of the Smiths may not require the services of a good psychiatrist after all. The elder Smith had several dreams in the years leading up to the discovery and translation of the golden plates and publication of the Book of Mormon. In one, he stumbles upon a box and eats its contents before being compelled to “drop the box, and fly for [his] life.” In another, he wanders a barren field aimlessly until he discovers “a narrow path . . . beautiful stream of water . . . a rope running along the bank” and beyond a “very pleasant valley, in which stood a tree such as [he] had never seen before.” In this dream, opposite the tree whose fruit is delicious and “white as snow” stands a “spacious building” filled with contemptuous but finely adorned persons of social standing. They can do no better than ridicule the righteous few gathered around the Tree of Life in the valley below. A spirit guide explains that the building is “Babylon,” hence its occupants “despise the Saints of God because of their humility” as a matter of course.36 Lehi has a vision of the Almighty, who descends “out of the midst of heaven . . . his luster . . . above that of the sun at noon-day.”37 Not unlike the elder Smith, he, too, is given a book but told to read it and has a vision of a fruit tree of renown. The same obstacles must be overcome before partaking of the fruit: rivers of filthy water, smoke, forbidden paths, a tall and spacious building catering to one’s most base desires. In Lehi’s dream, an iron rod guides the faithful on their way. In Joseph Sr.’s, it is a rope.

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  The Trials of Life Avery Allyn, A Ritual of Freemasonry (Philadelphia, 1831), reproduced in Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 271.

Importantly, the garden scenes in the elder Smith’s dreams and in the Book of Mormon take place in the more democratic, liberal English gardens of the Enlightenment “in which the architecture of the landscape,” as Scott Abbott explains, “was intended to reflect and inspire moral, naturally human, non-absolutist pattern.” Following the belt-walk, or circuit, of an English garden, Abbott points out, “the initiate was meant to undergo a moral education.”38 Lehi’s “iron rod” may well allude to the English belt-walk, both serving to guide visitors along the right path. An 1831 depiction of the Royal Arch “trial of life,” however, shows three blindfolded initiates holding firmly to a taut piece of rope as they run the gauntlet and thus test their moral resolve. Or the iron rod might be a reference to the Masonic plumb line that “admonishes us to walk uprightly in our several stations before God and man.”39 Since the Book

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  Journey of the Freemason in the World (Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, ca. 1830) Scott Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), illustrations.

of Mormon identifies the iron rod as the Word of God, the Mark Master Degree becomes another possible source, since the “Line” or fifth emblem of Masonry “direct[s] our steps to the path which leads to immortality.”40 The 1st emblem, the “Sacred Volume,” also directs one’s steps (p. 38). Finally, the idea in the Book of Mormon of “holding to the rod” might refer to the rule of the Grand Master, which is compared to a “rod of iron.”41 In the Scottish Rite (which runs in tandem to the Royal Arch), the circuitous path that the Mason must follow meanders along a raging river that one swims as a test of moral resolve. (The Book of Mormon counsels against this.) Smoke and fire obscure one’s vision from time to time. In one depiction of the Scottish Rite from around 1830, a large and spacious castle appears opposite a small

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grove of trees where a banquet of some kind is being served. In the middle stands the acacia, a fruit-bearing tree like that in Lehi’s dream. The “sweet Acacia” (acacia farnesiana), as it happens, is not only native to the southwestern United States but known for its extremely fragrant and beautiful floral decoration. The fruit of the Tree of Life in Lehi’s dream is likewise “most sweet, above all that [he] ever had before tasted.”42 In Nephi’s greatly expanded version of the same dream, an angelic messenger explains that the tree represents “the Lamb of God” (p. 25). Past Master and Masonic apologist par excellence Arthur Edward Waite explains that the acacia, or Tree of Life, in Masonic lore “signifies simplicity, innocence and the mind turning from evil, as if with instinctive horror.”43 (In Masonic parlance, the phrase “The Acacia is known to me” denotes one’s status as a Master Mason.) “In the Third Symbolical Grade, according to the classification adopted by the MASONIC ORDER OF MEMPHIS,” Waite comments, “the Worshipful Master explains that ‘the Branch of Acacia . . . is an emblem of that ardent zeal for truth which should be cherished by every Master, encompassed as he is by corrupted men who betray it’ ” (1:2). A Masonic source closer to home, in Aurora, New York (just thirty-two miles southeast of Palmyra as the crow flies), propounds a Christocentric interpretation of the Tree of Life that is reminiscent of that in the Book of Mormon.44 In the Knight of the Sun, or Twenty-eighth Degree of the Scottish Rite, the acacia symbolizes “the resurrection and immortality,” closely related to the Word.45 The other striking feature in this allegory is the time devoted to the Virgin Mary. The Book of Mormon is almost Catholic in its reverence for the mother of God. “And I beheld the city of Nazareth; and in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white,” Nephi writes.46 This slip is often cited as proof by Evangelical critics of Smith’s ignorance of the Bible, Bethlehem not Nazareth being the place of the nativity. None, however, stop to think about how this contradicts the conventional wisdom that Smith was the product of a biblical culture and Protestant upbringing. It does jibe with the Degree of the Rosy Cross, wherein Nazareth is a significant word and denotes Jesus’ place of origin.47 Moreover, that the Book of Mormon should speak so glowingly of the blessed Virgin (on par with its admiration for Jesus of Nazareth) seems to go against the Evangelical grain, though it is perfectly consistent with the Templar reverence for the Mother of God. A French order calling itself “Forest Masonry” may shed some light on the question of why Smith’s first revelations, if they are Masonic, were outdoors. As Clegg explains, though not necessarily connected to Masonic fraternity,

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they accepted both men and women and met outdoors when they could, decorating their lodge to resemble as much as possible a wooded glen (1:26–32, 353). That the conversion experiences of both Smith and Finney seem to employ many of the same Masonic tropes, but of the covertly adoptive and androgynous kind, speaks volumes. Both men seem equally interested in a more open and inclusive form of worship. Finney will let his heart guide him to a full and rich life of evangelical ministry, whereas Smith (more or less as he tells us) was unsuccessful. He failed to find in the outdoor and inclusive spirit of Evangelical revival a vehicle for male empowerment—albeit one that does not exclude women—instead, it seemed obvious to him from the start that most revivalists preached with female converts in mind. Smith, in hoping to correct this oversight, perhaps went too far the other way—at least in the Book of Mormon. His intention was to craft a sermon that did not exclude women, but it speaks rather too forcefully and singularly to men. Lehi’s counsel to his wayward sons, Laman and Lemuel, can be seen as more Masonic analogue. “Awake from a deep sleep,” he admonishes them, “even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the chains which bind the children of men, that they are carried away captive down to the eternal gulf of misery and wo.” He goes on to tell them that “the Lord hath redeemed [his] soul from hell,” that he beheld “his glory” and was “encircled about eternally in the arms of his love.” As we will see, whenever Lehi or others in the Book of Mormon talk of the hellfire awaiting the wicked, it is not that of orthodox Protestantism: it is Masonic hellfire to which Lehi alludes, in short, the eternal sorrow that comes from ignorance of the male mysteries. Moral man dare not go it alone. Such statements have a Calvinist ring to them. Perhaps they are Calvinist. The important point is that such existential doom and gloom is not entirely foreign to Masonry, either. In the lecture portion of the Royal Arch Degree, the initiate is reminded that men are “frail creatures of the dust, offending against his most holy will and word, yet the adopted children of his mercy.”48 Indeed, his description of the Fall of Adam “and the dreadful penalty entailed on all his posterity” (p. 103) are not only Lehi’s final words of counsel to Laman and Lemuel but the last bit of moral advice in the Royal Arch Degree: “We can do no good or acceptable service,” it says, “but through him, from whom all good counsels and just works proceed, and without whose aid we shall ever be found unprofitable servants in his sight” (p. 103). The Book of Mormon comes very close to quoting this verbatim: “If ye should serve him with all your whole soul,” it says, “and yet ye would be unprofitable servants.”49

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What soon becomes clear is that whether praising Nephi or admonishing Laman and Lemuel, Lehi’s fondest wish is that his sons become men of Masonic sensibility. “Arise from the dust, my sons,” he lovingly exclaims, “and be men, and be determined in one mind, and in one heart united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity; that ye may not be cursed with a sore cursing; and also that ye may not incur the displeasure of a just God upon you, unto the destruction, yea, eternal destruction of both soul and body” (p. 61; emphasis mine). Lehi’s final words are not simply the ruminations of an Old Testament Jacob but that of a Grand Master—in this case, a homily usually read at investiture ceremonies and the granting of Masonic dispensations or charters. Lehi as Grand Master has every right to organize new lodges and grant dispensations, respectively.50 His sermon in the Book of Mormon and the lecture of the Grand Master at investiture proceedings both touch on “the most important problems of human destiny”—quoting Grand Master Rob Morris—such as “death, interment, the resurrection of the body, and the immortality of the soul . . . rationally applied to the present improvement of the heart” (p. 284). In 1830 Smith published the history of a people who had started a Grand Lodge on American soil centuries earlier with God’s help and yet of their own accord. He had in the Book of Mormon a fictive Masonic “legal precedent,” to be sure, but more important a template for a widespread patriarchal retrenchment movement. The fact that his First Vision accords so perfectly with the visions of Lehi and Nephi in the Book of Mormon and that all this has a Masonic subtext suggests that Mormonism did not fall far from the acacia. That said, the Book of Mormon attacks secret societies. A yarn spun by a disgruntled Masonic insider rather than an Evangelical outsider, it takes two parties to task: Masonry for the grisly murder of Morgan and Evangelical anti-Masonry, too, for grandstanding and political avarice. The notion that the book was meant to castigate Masons from top to bottom is due to the assumption that a band of political anarchists in the Book of Mormon, the “Gadianton Robbers,” are Masons in skimpy antique dress. “   , ” Fawn Brodie writes, “the Gadiantons claimed to derive their secrets from Tubal Cain.”51 Brodie confuses Cain, the titular head of the Gadianton band in the Book of Mormon, with Tubal-Cain—a descendant of Cain through Lamech (Genesis 4:22). Tubal-Cain does not appear anywhere in the Book of Mormon.52 The name has Masonic significance, to be sure: it is a password in the Master Mason initiation ceremony.53 Mackey explains, “Tubal Cain has been consecrated among Masons of the present day as an ancient

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brother. His introduction of the arts of civilization having given the first value to property, Tubal Cain has been considered among Masons as a symbol of worldly possessions.” But Masonry does not claim descent from him, and most assuredly not from Cain! Again, Mackey explains: The legends and truths which were transmitted pure through the race of Seth, were altered and corrupted by that of Cain, and much confusion arose in consequence of the frequent intercommunications of these two races before the deluge, though the truth would still be understood by the faithful. Of these was Noah . . . enabled to distinguish truth from falsehood, and to transmit the former in a direct line . . . through Shem. . . . Hence Freemasons are sometimes called Noachidae, the descendants and disciples of Noah. But Ham had been long familiar with the corruptions of the system of Cain . . . and after the deluge he propagated the worst features of both systems among his descendants, out of which he and his immediate posterity formed the institution known, by way of distinction, as the Spurious Freemasonry.54

 , the protagonists in the Book of Mormon, are Noachites (the two even sound a little alike), through Shem, whereas the Gadiantons and their Lamanite sympathizers descend from Cain, either literally or by adoption. The Book of Mormon does not impugn the character of Masonry per se when it chronicles the undemocratic activities of the Gadiantons. Such criticism can only have been intended for apostates and enemies of the order. In Waite’s New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, he discusses the Masonic legend of the “Assassins and Anseyreeh.” Like the Gadiantons, they constitute “a confederated murder-system,” reside in the mountains, favoring the dagger as their weapon of offense, and perpetrate political murder and coups d’état by first “winning confidence.”55 The Assassins are related to the Thuggee, a Hindu and Moslem secret society believed to have constituted a worldwide network of spies, a cause célèbre in England in 1799 and again in 1826—ironically, the year of Morgan’s abduction. Thugs worshiped the goddess Kali. They had their own degrees, and their rituals include magical circles, hieroglyphics, and covenants to destroy the human race (1:28–33). The Knights Templar are the archenemies of all such secret combinations, the posterity of Ishmael, and the so-called Saracen hordes, who will occupy Jerusalem and eventually exterminate the Templars. The Gadiantons, can be seen as Masonry’s legendary assassins. The Nephites and Gadiantons battle it out in the narrative as veiled Christian Knights and Saracens, respectively, the former falling to the latter in a final battle to the death.

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Even with no other clues, Smith’s use of the word “excitement” to describe his enemies and the sectarian climate that gave impetus to his religious awakening gives him away. Masons used “excitement” as a pejorative to describe their Evangelical enemies in the Antimasonic Party. This suggests that Smith’s epiphany should probably be dated no earlier than 1826.56 The important point is not the date of his religious awakening, however, but that the language of the First Vision can be seen as that of a Masonic sympathizer of some stripe in the wake of the Morgan affair. Revivalism per se is not the target of his vitriol, but rather the rancor of Evangelical anti-Masonry. “The theme of excitement,” Bullock explains, was “the cornerstone of [the Masonic] attack on Antimasonry.”57 Defenders of Masonry attempted to explain away the Morgan affair as not unlike the popular excitements and delusions that had ended Socrates’ and Jesus’ lives, at bottom the kind of popish plot that had resulted in the massacre of righteous men from time immemorial. Likewise, Smith’s use of “secret combinations” vis-à-vis the Gadiantons can be seen as Masonic, an epithet for Evangelical anti-Masonry at the time. William Ellery Channing, America’s premier Unitarian, spoke out against the Antimasonic Party in 1829, describing it as “the principle of combination” that sets out to “spread one set of opinions or crush another.” He was particularly critical of the way Evangelicals used the “various and rapid . . . means of communication” to great effect.58 Masons accused Evangelicals of bombarding the public with a single, overarching idea—whether true or not. Truth be told, the Antimasonic Party waged a very effective, modern-style political campaign, and Masons merely begged them to exhibit some grace, if not tolerance—to no avail.59 Each hurled a wide array of extremely unflattering names at the other. But as a rule Masons, not Evangelicals, used the phrase “secret combinations” to describe and ridicule their enemies.60 Masons described the Antimasonic Party as “desperate fanatics [who would] drench this land of freedom with the blood of its sons! And for what? Office, office!”61 The Book of Mormon makes a similar point: “Whatsoever nation shall uphold such secret combinations, to get power and gain, until they shall spread over the nation,” it warns, “behold, they shall be destroyed, for the Lord will not suffer that the blood of his saints, which shall be shed by them, shall always cry unto him from the ground for vengeance upon them.”62 The polemic in the Book of Mormon takes issue with the smear tactics of its opponents. For example, those in Lehi’s vision who mock and point their fingers cause some to feel “ashamed” after partaking of the sweet fruit of the Tree of Life. Might this be a veiled critique of the Antimasonic Party’s militant

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  Anti–Anti-Masonic Polemic, Albany, New York, 1831 Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 305.

propagandizing? We get some sense of the hurt the Antimasonic Party caused men of Masonic sensibility when the Book of Mormon describes the Jaredite voyage to the promised land: “And thus they were tossed upon the waves of the sea before the wind. And it came to pass that they were many times buried in the depths of the sea, because of the mountain waves which broke upon them, and also the great and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind.” In the story of the Jaredites, the enemies of righteousness are savvy media types, very good with words and able to manipulate the public mind. Jared, the son of Omer, “did flatter much people, because of his cunning words until he gained the half of the kingdom” (pp. 548–549). In fact, the Book of Mormon repeatedly blames the downfall of the people of God on slick politicking, smooth-talking carpetbaggers and scalawags of one sort or another. Such disturbers of the peace are also called “Anti-Christs,” an-

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  Masonic Penalties on Candidates Avery Allyn, A Ritual of Freemasonry (Philadelphia, 1831), reproduced in Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 300.

other bit of Masonic name-calling and cipher for Evangelical anti-Masons. The so-called Anti-Nephi-Lehis are Lamanite converts and thus another jab at the Antimasonic Party. E. Cecil McGavin’s Mormonism and Masonry implies that the Book of Mormon may have intended to malign the gentleman class of Freemasonry by an “ancient” linkage to Cain.63 Indubitably! Thus Brodie was not entirely wide of the mark to have seen the Gadiantons as an attack directed at Masonry. Yet she would have done well to consider that Lamanite converts and Nephites are Masons of the Noachite kind, with their Lamanite enemies being Spurious Masons and thus adopted into the lineage of Cain. The Book of Mormon does not distinguish between Spurious Masonry and Evangelical anti-Masonry in the final analysis, purposively confusing them as part of a two-pronged attack

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against religious elitism generally. To be sure, both threatened to undermine the hegemony of the pristine Nephite/Noachite (Royal) priesthood order. Smith’s frustration mounted as he neared the end of his short life. On April 7, 1844, he used the occasion of the funeral of a friend to vent his spleen, exclaiming: “You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it; I shall never undertake it.”64 Short of coming out and saying unequivocally that his church was a new order of Knights Templar, it could not have been much clearer to anyone who knew their Royal Arch Masonry. In the 1830s, though, coming out and just saying this was certain to backfire in the heady days of the Antimasonic Party. And by the 1840s broaching the subject of Mormonism’s considerable debt to fraternalism might have destroyed the sense of mystery and uniqueness that had attracted adherents to the movement in the first place. To have been misunderstood on such a grand scale served his purposes. He complained bitterly, knowing better than clear up the confusion. Looking back, it is hard to believe that not a single person knew (of) Smith’s (Masonic) history. His strong words that April morning may have been a throwing down of the gauntlet. Let any in the brotherhood accuse Smith of stealing their thunder, and he would give them what for. He was ready to face the music at long last, Masonic and/or Evangelical. The rejoinder from orthodox Masonic circles was swift and lethal. Storming the jail where he awaited trial proceedings for his part in the attempted murder of Lilburn W. Boggs, the governor of Missouri, Masons and Evangelicals alike riddled Smith’s body with shot as he attempted to escape through a window. Smith’s last words, “Oh Lord My God,” the sign of the Master Mason, had only egged them on. His executioners then erected a scaffold from which to hang the lifeless body of the Mormon leader. Cutting him down, they wanted to cut off his head—the ultimate Masonic disgrace and penalty—but were persuaded to leave well enough alone. Every one of his murderers was acquitted in legal proceedings that would have made the judge and jury in the Morgan trial blush. Meanwhile, America watched from the wings with no great sadness or compunction about standing idly by and letting the “men” settle this one. Smith was laid to rest in an unmarked grave, and his Masonic history died with him, the Book of Mormon buried in the same, soonto-be forgotten corner of the Lord’s vineyard in the century to come.

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four

as the words of a book that is sealed: the book of mormon as esoteric male (hi)story “Was not Joseph Smith a money digger?” Yes, but it was never a very profitable job for him, as he only got fourteen dollars a month for it. —Joseph Smith Jr.

   of Smith’s social standing gave us a book quite like the Book of Mormon: a comprehensive literary, theological, social, and cultural mission statement and missionary tool that spoke with considerable force to a restive faction in American and European society, becoming the basis for a world religion. In the midst of the Morgan affair, Smith, as I will attempt to show, used romance as the flagship for his Masonic ideas. Ironically, the Book of Mormon spoke rather profoundly to unsuspecting women of Evangelical sensibility. Fanny Stenhouse is a case in point. In her memoir Tell It All: The Tyranny of Mormonism, she describes her conversion and then protracted emancipation. Her polemic notwithstanding, she was seduced, in a sense, by the Mormon elders, eventually into polygamy. Their message may well have been inclined, though possibly not designed, “to deceive an uninitiated person.” A variety of shocking blasphemies are “hidden from the convert whom it was desirable,” Stenhouse writes, “to impress with the idea that Mormonism was only a development of Christianity.” In her view, much of Smith’s early religious writings, especially his confession of faith (thirteen articles in total), had been purposely ambiguous, intelligible only to the initiated. She was also correct, it seems to me, to suspect that “if Polygamy were to be relinquished, it would still be found that Mormonism had really very little in common with other sects, and very much that was completely antagonistic to them.”1

N

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A nuanced reading of the Book of Mormon might have saved Stenhouse a lot of grief. The book lauds the virtues of the mischievous, the hidden and mysterious. It is written in a secret dialect of Egyptian, a “sealed book” to “learned” readers of all stripes.2 Jesus, upon his visit to the New World, quotes a passage in John concerning “other sheep” and then explains its hidden meaning: “And they [his Old World audience] understood me not, for they supposed it had been the Gentiles: for they understood not that the Gentiles should be converted through their preaching” (p. 486). The book has Jesus repeating the phrase “they understood me not” over and over. In the final chapter, it says that one “may know the truth of all things” and then only by the “power of the Holy Ghost” (p. 586; emphasis mine). That Smith and his disciples were not obliged to be perfectly candid seems to have been lost on Fanny. What did she expect from a book and people obsessed with mystery and beating around the (burning) bush? Mormon elders who saw the likes of Fanny come and go had another agenda. The Book of Mormon can be seen as a fine specimen of Masonic fiction, a clever weaving of biblical and fraternal analogue meant to provide a temporary male-female lodging until more suitable (patriarchal) accommodations could be erected. Evangelicals who mistook Mormonism for a mere development of Christianity (in part because of either not reading or mistaking the Book of Mormon for warm Christian pietism) would figure it out when they crossed the threshold to the temple in the 1840s and afterward—just as Fanny did. Scholars of Mormonism have never quite grasped this, that the Book of Mormon and the temple constitute a ritualist continuum, one literary, the other literally the House of the Lord. The Book of Mormon functioned in much the same way as the Ark of the Covenant: as a portable locus of Masonic worship in the antebellum wilderness. It was more or less as Tolstoy thought, a case of lies for a good purpose—but Masonic in nature. Carnes explains that “those with lively enough imaginations could experience something like an initiation without ever becoming a lodge member. During the nineteenth century, fiction provided boys and men another kind of encounter with the initiatory motifs of fraternal ritual.”3 In the great bulk of these male or Masonic-inspired fictions, as Carnes has shown, the initiate is portrayed as immature and unmasculine at first but able to overcome adversity, nearly dying at the hands of an angry father figure, only to be saved by his own emergent masculinity (p. 125). Scott Abbott’s Fictions of Freemasonry offers much startling evidence that suggests all such Masonic writing had a tendency to indulge in a kind of necessary but benign historical deceit. (Alas, there is no

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way to sugarcoat it, but the great religions are in no position to throw stones.) What soon becomes clear is that history and fiction in Masonic literature form a Gordian knot that cannot simply be untied, a fact that patriarchy’s defenders down through the ages have used to great advantage to spread their message of manhood found. Masonic histories are pure invention. The Rosicrucian history, Fama Fraternitatis (1614), was the first such apology for the faith and the model for three centuries for what Abbott calls “reams of [Masonic] fiction.”4 James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Free Masons, containing the History, Charges, Regulations etc. of the most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity, the eighteenth-century English Masonic history (1723) is an example, making no attempt to be true to the facts.5 Some within the order objected to such poetic license. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte took exception to what he considered to be a “web of deceit,” chastising Masonic apologists for going too far. Abbott explains that “much of the century’s Masonic activity is inextricably entwined with various legends, stories, novels, and even frauds.”6 Fichte objected to the ingenuity of Berlin Mason Ignatius Aurelius Fessler in particular, suggesting that the wisest course of action vis-à-vis Masonry’s cultured despisers was a clear statement of fictional intent. Misrepresentation would surely open a floodgate of biting criticism. Although Fessler agreed in principle, he could not quite bring himself to ignore the short-term benefits of dressing fable in historical garb. “No fiction!” was his reply to Fichte (cited on p. 29). In other words, too much candor would only hurt the movement. And let critics say what they will, fiction was a more compelling argument in the final analysis. “No history!” was perhaps what Fichte meant or should have said. “The desire for supporting, indeed legitimizing, historical roots was strong in the eighteenth century, as it has always been.” Abbott goes on to explain. “This is evident in the eight competing, variously influential theories concerning the origin of eighteenth-century Masonry. . . . So in one sense Fessler was justified in rejecting Fichte’s recommendation that his ‘history’ be labeled story. . . . Like many religious innovators, the founders of the most successful Freemasonic branches used Fessler’s kind of (hi)story to establish legitimacy and to express their principles” (pp. 29–30). Masonic fiction per se had the same modus operandi, the difference a matter of degree not kind. François de Salignac de La Fenelon’s Aventures de Télémaque (1699) is generally thought to be the first bona fide Masonic novel. Andrew Michael Ramsay’s Les Voyages de Cyrus (1727) and Jean Terrasson’s Sethos (1730) complete the Masonic literary triumvirate. (The great bulk of Masonic-inspired history and/or fiction owes an indirect debt to Terrasson in particular.) The first Masonic novelist to

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incorporate decidedly Christian themes was Carl Friedreich Bahrdt, in his fictional history of Jesus Christ, entitled Ausfuhrung des Plans und Zweckes Jesu (Explanation of the plan and purpose of Jesus, 1784–1792).7 The Book of Mormon can be seen as Masonic (hi)story or fiction. Most critics fail to grasp the significance of the title page of the 1830 edition, which identifies Smith as the book’s author.8 (Alexander Campbell was the first to notice this, but not the last.)9 The text under the title reads: “AN ACCOUNT WRITTEN BY THE HAND OF MORMON, UPON PLATES TAKEN FROM THE PLATES OF NEPHI.” Two ensuing paragraphs underscore this. And yet “By Joseph Smith, Junior, author and proprietor” appears in bold type at the bottom. (Whether Fichte would have considered such a caveat sufficiently clear is difficult to say.) The matter seems more than a simple case of Smith claiming the rights of authorship (the orthodox Mormon explanation) or lying in order to dupe readers and fill his pockets (the contention of some critics).10 Smith’s authorial ambivalence could also be seen as standard Masonic practice and thus done with the best of intentions. In fact, we do not need Masonry to get the Mormon prophet out of this jam. If guilty of mere religious invention, then he is in some very good company. Jewish and Christian history—that in the Bible, at least—operates according to the same principle. Donald H. Akenson’s book, Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, for example, shows that the core books of the Hebrew Scriptures—the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—constitute an inventive reworking of Hebraic legend by a fictitious author-editor. Ironically, and without realizing it, to be sure, Akenson echoes Fessler, opining that invention is the essence of the very best (indeed prescient) history. “Inventors do not create,” Akenson is careful to note, “for creation is to make something where there was nothing. Inventors use what is at hand, and then they add something of their own genius, whether it is new ways of recombining old elements, or tiny little improvements in existing parts so that what otherwise would not work does; or they take out their tools and make a part of new design and suddenly everything works.”11 In the Bible, he continues, “we have that rarest of occurrences in . . . history, namely, an independently-attested cause for a biblically-evidenced effect” (p. 63). Likewise, the success of the great Genesis-Kings superimposition (the core books of the Hebrew Bible and the imaginative reconstruction of a single writer), Akenson observes, hinged on that author’s ability to appear to be a mere editor. “For the storyteller, for the historian” he continues, “it probably was not relevant whether they [readers] understood what was romance: the

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fiction, the narrative as a whole, communicated the author’s point. That the first real historian in world history later had his text turned into sacred writ— indeed, many subsequently declared it to be the word of God—is not an honour he sought” (p. 61). Had Fessler only been this wily, German Masonry might not have lost Fichte. In any event, Masonic deceit pales in comparison to the ancient Jewish and early Christian elevation of myth to the level of history in the Old and New Testaments. In fact, the famous biblical scholar Albert Schweitzer, author of the seminal Quest of the Historical Jesus, took his cue from Bahrdt’s controversial Masonic history of Jesus but came down on the side of Fichte, turning the Masonic rationale for historical pretense on its head and arguing that the invention of the Gospels effectively removed the historical Jesus from the realm of objective investigation.12 Falsely claiming an ancient tradition or text as one’s own goes at least as far back as the ancient Hebrews, who employed a variety of archaizing techniques (very effectively) and a fair bit of mythological piracy to lend credence to their cause. Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible, his person no doubt a figment of Hebrew imagination. The evidence for the Egyptian captivity is scant; the Exodus is so much allegorical wishful thinking on the part of Babylon’s Jewish exiles; and the Hebrew Bible is in large part a pastiche of Mesopotamian lore reorganized to suit nationalistic dreams of elites. The first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis lack any foundation in historical fact, whereas “the customs and conditions described in Genesis 12–50 present data indigenous to the second millennium,” that pericope rising to the level of mere plausibility.13 Jesus fares no better than Moses and the Patriarchs, the New Testament not much better than the Old. The founder of Christianity’s existence is a matter of historical record, but the important events of his religious life— his miracles and resurrection—find no such support outside the Gospels.14 We know that the early Christian apologists expropriated the Hebrew past. Justin Martyr’s rejoinder to his Jewish critic Trypho that passages about Jesus are contained “in your Scriptures, or rather not yours, but ours” had the desired effect. Ignatius purported that the Hebrew prophets observed Sunday rather than the Jewish Sabbath, and Justin even suggested that Jesus had been “known in part even by Socrates,” extending Christianity’s sphere of influence to include ancient pagan wisdom.15 Such historical deceit merely endeavored to respond to the widely held classical belief in the truth of ancient systems of belief and practice (p. 34). Christianity’s preeminent cultured defenders manufactured historical antecedents to ward off such accusations of mere invention (p. 40). Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History and likewise Augustine’s City of God,

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Jaroslav Pelikan explains, “translated apologetics into history; but the history was not merely the account of the succession of the church from the apostles, but the whole way of divine providence” (p. 41). What, then, was Fichte’s problem? Fessler had pursued a time-honored course of fictional misrepresentation in the interest of institutional longevity and the dissemination of the larger suprahistorical truth. This much is clear: history favors Fessler, not Fichte. The secular world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature made few attempts to resist the temptation to fudge the books in order to sell copies. Travelogues were notorious. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a case in point. The preface to the original 1719 edition reads: “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.” Robinson Crusoe was not intended merely to titillate but to edify, a story told with “a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them.”16 Great controversy surrounded the book. Some believed that Defoe had published (as his own?) a manuscript written by the earl of Oxford while a prisoner in the Tower. There was even talk that the two men conspired to publish a fraudulent history. William Lee, in the introduction to the 1863 American edition, had this to say: “’Tis as reasonable to represent one kind of Imprisonment by another, as it is to represent any Thing that really exists by that which exists not. Had the common way of writing a man’s private History been taken, and I had given you the conduct or Life of a man you knew . . . all I could have said would have yielded no Diversion, and perhaps scarce have obtained a reading, or at best no attention, the Teacher, like a greater, having no Honour in his own country” (cited on p. xiii). The first to take a firm stand against Bible-inspired fiction were Puritan and Evangelical divines. “As a result of Christians’ deeply rooted view of the Bible as sacred and inviolable,” David Reynolds explains, “Biblical fiction appeared later and in lesser quantity than other kinds of religious fiction.”17 Even the most daring biblical fictionalizers in America (such as Joseph Holt Ingraham, author of Captain Kidd and several religious fictions) were reticent to invent stories based on the Bible with the same reckless abandon as Freemasons like Bahrdt. Evangelical anti-Masonry coincided with a religious holy war against biblical romance, too.18 Revivalists accused the genre of being dishonest, undemocratic, and even immoral, upholding Plato’s accusation that novelists were even bigger liars than poets. As late as 1847 the North American Review continued to attack religious fiction, although many within Evangelical ranks had been beguiled by a steady stream of religious invention: “There is a general dis-

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trust of works commonly called religious novels. We usually find in them either an intolerable infusion of doctrinal theology, or a mixture absolutely revolting of earthly passion and spiritual pride; so that it may be deemed lucky, if they are only tedious and uninteresting.”19 Protestant novelists tried to allay fears by rhetorically denouncing fiction themselves, insisting theirs were (hi)stories of the most unequivocal sort. Allene Stuart Phy in an essay appropriately titled “Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told: Jesus in Popular Fiction,” explains that “the majority of the first American novelists, despite formidable opposition, valiantly defended their vocation by insisting that their stories were based on fact, which they then pretended to take pains to authenticate. . . . The novel was still suspect and only succeeded in gaining admittance into the more upright homes when it started assuming the masks of history, biography, and New Testament Christianity.”20 Avoiding the charge of unadulterated invention by means of a number of ingenious tropes, authors prefaced their works with disclaimers of any fictional distortions, identified their purpose as highly moralistic in nature, and employed such literary devices as epistolary narrative to simulate reality. The Jesus of these dramatic and creative retellings, Phy goes on to explain, was thus, “a Jesus of American culture, stripped of ‘theological accretions’—trimmings that have, the authors often believe, made him distasteful and incomprehensible, that have obscured the vitality of his personality and the force of his message. In this manner traditional Christianity has been sacrificed to a bland and colourless American religious pluralism” (p. 76). Phy credits two Unitarians, William Ware and Samuel Richardson, as the cofounders of a “flourishing genre in American popular literature” (p. 45). Ingraham’s famous The Prince of the House of David, of which the author claimed to be merely the editor, figures prominently, written with high hopes of “convincing one son or daughter of Abraham to accept Jesus as the Messiah, or convince the infidel Gentile that He is the very Son of God and Creator of the world” (p. 47). (Ironically, the narrative structure is the same as that in Captain Kidd.) Incidentally, we know that Smith expressed great fondness for Ingraham’s writings, particularly Captain Kidd—though one book does not a reader make.21 All this sheds considerable light on the issue of the Book of Mormon’s historical claims, as well as the thorny issue of the book’s alleged similarities to Solomon Spaulding’s romance Manuscript Found, which contemporaries thought Smith had plagiarized. Spaulding and Smith employ the same Masonic trope, that of the quest for the long lost book, but the two narratives are

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quite different. There is no truth to the charge that Smith plagiarized Spaulding. Let us be careful, however, not to suppose that Smith and Spaulding were two American princes of Serendip, discovering by dint of accident and sagacity a Masonic mythological treasure trove of which neither had any prior knowledge.22 Royal Arch Masonry may have been their muse. Abbott has shown that in Goethe’s Masonic novel Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, for example, the central theme is novelist cum treasure hunter and novel as treasure.23 The 1821 edition of the Travels contains the following introductory poem: And so I raise old treasures, Most curious in this case; If [I] do not count them gold, They are still metals. One can smelt, one can separate, Becomes pure, can be weighed, May many a friend joyfully Coin it himself in his own image. (cited on p. 60)

In the 1829 edition, the Masonic legend of the quest for gold is expounded. Novelist and treasure hunter are one and the same, magical stones and divining rods instruments of the Almighty—though the aspirant is mindful not to misuse them or misconstrue the search for gold (knowledge) as a means of obtaining material riches. The Masonic novelist, it says, “works with a slippery medium” (cited on p. 62), and so he is wary lest he sink to the level of the disreputable treasure hunter. In the narrative, Felix, Wilhelm’s traveling companion, retrieves from a crevice a little box described as old in appearance, made of gold, about the size of an octavo volume—a “splendid little book” (cited on p. 63). It comes with a key and a stern warning: the uninitiated and superstitious dare not touch it. The 1829 edition of Wilhelm Meister’s Travels was about the size of an octavo volume. No mere accident. Does this not evoke the Book of Mormon, a Masonic work of autobiographical and cultural imagination, the literary basis for a recovery of lost male mystery and virtue on a grand scale? Smith’s can be seen as an octavo volume, the Book of Mormon a surrogate for Masonic ritual and literary-based rite of passage. Carnes explains that “those with lively enough imaginations could experience something like an initiation without ever becoming a lodge member”

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  Florine of Burgundy, Templar Knight and Faithful Companion of Sweno the Dane Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorsten, 1911), 5:108b.

and that “fiction provided boys and men another kind of encounter with the initiatory motifs of fraternal ritual.”24 Smith provided male readers with a veiled literary means of disentanglement from the female sphere of moral dominance that had left some cold and forced others to journey the emotional path to adulthood without any parental assistance or male role model. Boys raised by women will seek some form of “masculine identity,” Carnes opines.

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“The psychological impulse that gives rise to initiation,” he goes on to explain, “is a human constant: Nineteenth-century fraternal ritual and a specialized literature for men developed such powerful initiatory themes because Victorian society exacerbated in this country a nearly universal distinction in adult gender roles” (p. 125). That said, the Book of Mormon also invited women to read it in earnest and thus participate in hitherto exclusively male rites of passage. A book, unlike a lodge, cannot discriminate. Women as well as men were not only free but encouraged to peruse its pages. The Book of Mormon narrative even includes women as equal participants in its many veiled Masonic raisings. Smith’s Masonic vision, then, his reasons for publishing the Book of Mormon, went well beyond merely satisfying some exclusively boyish need for adult male role models; he sought a comprehensive and more inclusive knitting of father to mother, son, and daughter and vice versa according to an adoptive Masonic lodge system. A temporary abode and literary place of male-female worship, the Book of Mormon would suffice, moreover, until something more permanent could be erected. And, as will be seen, the temple would ultimately steal the Book of Mormon’s thunder, the latter becoming simply and exclusively a missionary tool that, read out of context, gave new converts entirely the wrong impression of what was in store for them and to what they had indentured themselves—a consequence, perhaps, of Smith’s Fesslerian aversion for fiction.

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fleeing babel with Mother and child in tow “Do the Mormons believe in having more wives than one?’ No, not at the same time. But they believe that if their companion dies, they have the right to marry again. —Joseph Smith Jr. There is another class of individuals to whom I will briefly refer. Shall we call them Christians? They were Christians originally. We cannot be admitted into their social societies, in their places of gathering at certain times and on certain occasions, because they are afraid of polygamy. I will give you their title that you may all know whom I am talking about it [sic]—I refer to the Freemasons. . . . Who was the founder of Freemasonry? They can go back as far as Solomon, and there they stop. There is the king who established this high and holy order. Now was he a polygamist, or was he not? —Brigham Young

   in the midst of a protracted battle—most pronounced, of course, in the North—over the proper sphere of men and women within the new economic realities of an emerging industrial nation-state. It made more sense to more and more of antebellum America’s middling sort for women to exercise absolute moral authority over children, giving men more time and energy to pursue their professional vocations and pecuniary responsibilities. Wives continued to monitor expenditures, ensuring that husbands did not fritter away the family’s hardearned money. Early Mormonism utterly rejected this arrangement, propounding a less unequal distribution of parental authority: father and mother as a moral coalition party in the parliament of the home, with veto power going to the father. The Book of Mormon’s inclusion of women in its veiled Masonic ritual was the first plank in this platform. Mormon feminists balk at the paucity of female role models in the Book of Mormon and the rest of the Mormon canon. Melodie Moench Charles explains

M

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that “women are less significant than men” in the LDS scriptures. The Book of Mormon is “written by males,” she writes, “and because it focuses on religious leaders, civic leaders, and battles, it primarily records the actions, speeches and thoughts of males.”1 Even the Doctrine and Covenants, Smith’s subsequent private revelations, contain but a single revelation addressed exclusively to a woman: a harsh indictment against Emma, wife of the Mormon prophet, for her reluctance to practice polygamy.2 Only six women are named in the Book of Mormon—Eve, Mary, and Sarah (who perform no significant narrative role), Sariah and Isabel (who are criticized), and Abish (the only woman of name to exemplify faith and represent a force for good). Sariah, the wife of Lehi the great patriarch is faithful but contentious. Not unlike Abraham’s wife (Sarah), Sariah lacks vision, doubting Lehi for sending their sons to reclaim the plates of brass from Laban. Isabel’s character is patterned after that of the biblical Jezebel. As Charles explains, “Isabel is a harlot who is merely a vehicle for male degeneracy.”3 In some respects, the nameless daughters of Ishmael, invited to accompany Lehi to the promised land so that his sons will have wives and he and Sariah grandchildren, serve a mere biological function. Abish, a Lamanite woman converted “on account of a remarkable vision of her father,” is the exception.4 When the Book of Mormon alludes to biblical stories in which women play a prominent role, males take their place. The story of Teancum is one example. The male Teancum steals into the camp of a Lamanite enemy under cover of darkness and, using a javelin, spears him through (p. 404). Teancum’s heroics are reminiscent of Jael’s in the Book of Judges, the brave woman who drove a nail through the temples of Sisera (Judges 4:21). The chief villain in the Book of Mormon is a woman, the ruthless daughter of Jared. Of the type of Herodias (Matthew 14:1–11)—the infamous New Testament coconspirator in the murder of John the Baptist—she resuscitates the Spurious Masonry of Cain in order to gain the throne for her father. “And it came to pass that she did talk with her father, and saith unto him, Whereby hath my father so much sorrow? Hath he not read the record which our fathers brought across the great deep? Behold, is there not an account concerning them of old, that they by their secret plans did obtain kingdoms and great glory?” Although her lover, Akish, carries out the killing of the king and “administer[ed] unto them the oaths which were given by them of old, who also sought power, which had been handed down even from Cain, who was a murderer from the beginning” (p. 553), we are told that “it was the daughter of Jared which put it into his heart to search up these things of old” (p. 554).

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“This is not an impressive tally,” Charles writes, “for a book of [over five hundred] pages.”5 Mormon playwright Carol Lynn Pearson agrees that the “antifemale bias” in the Book of Mormon is a problem,6 whereas Lynn Matthews Anderson turns this on its head, arguing that the Book of Mormon can be seen as a feminist resource. “Taken altogether,” she writes, “the Book of Mormon makes a strong case for the complete revamping of our notions of hierarchical, patriarchal priesthood and the dismantling of patriarchal systems generally; indeed, it is, as Carol Lynn Pearson points out, the history of a fallen people and an unrelenting testament to the failure of patriarchy. Its treatment of women . . . —and an admittedly paradoxical one at that—is why the Book of Mormon will ultimately be viewed as a superlative ‘liberation text.’ ”7 Anderson’s thesis may be a thinly veiled apology for the faith, but it has more to offer a discussion about the Book of Mormon’s Masonic agenda than one might think. Anderson is right about the book’s underlying message—the “dismantling of patriarchal systems generally”—but this was means to another patriarchal end: an adoptive lodge system of the European Templar and Scottish variety. This becomes much clearer the moment we consider the important ways the Book of Mormon does not exclude or criticize women. John Whitmer’s personal copy of the Book of Mormon, for example, has underlined passages that seem to invite women to join the ranks of the “Priesthood” in a variety of capacities. An underlined passage in the Book of Alma reads, “He imparteth his word by angels, unto men; yea, not only men, but women also.”8 By today’s standards, the Book of Mormon is extremely condescending to women, to be sure. Even so, both Charles and Anderson are correct! The Book of Mormon, as I will show, can be seen as a subversive, radical feminist statement in opposition to the standing male order in America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It invites men and women (and their children) to worship together at the altar of true manhood and thus true womanhood. More than doling out the usual patriarchal drivel in praise of motherhood, the text goes out of its way to include women as an essential part of the Masonic ritual celebration of fatherhood. Whether daughters, wives, or mothers, women in the Book of Mormon are portrayed as active and equal participants of a kind. The orthodox in Masonic circles believed that early Mormonism had a radical feminist agenda that might sway men and women of Masonic and anti-Evangelical sensibility to a new and more inclusive patriarchal way of thinking and living. Meanwhile, Evangelical Protestantism continued to back the Victorian family arrangement that would alienate fathers and sons, and possibly husbands and wives, in the years to come.

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  Arnold Friberg, Alma Baptizes in the Waters of Mormon The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).

The question of what to do with women had plagued Masonry beginning almost the minute the American Revolution ended. The more Masons hedged, the more Evangelicals saw their chance to move in for the kill. “As early as 1796,” Bullock writes, “Joseph Dunham identified the question, ‘Why are not ladies initiated into these Mysteries?’ as one ‘which has excited the curiosity and wonder, not only of that sex, but of the world at large.’ ”9 The response from the female Evangelical quarter expounded the cult of domesticity: the widespread Victorian belief in the innate depravity of men, women being a fount of virtue and morality. By excluding women from the lodge and its rituals, the fraternity seemed to sow the seeds of its own destruction. An anonymous Massachusetts woman, in an early, mildly anti-Masonic work entitled Observations on Free Masonry (1798), argued that women were initiated into Masonry at birth by virtue of their gender alone and that God instituted the lodge to teach the other sex what came naturally to women.10 But increasingly the

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prevailing wisdom held that the lodge was the abode of a band of sexually promiscuous drunkards.11 In the anti-Masonic literature, in particular, Freemasons were “utter Enemies of the Fair Sex.”12 The cult of domesticity had a number of flaws, giving men and women both too much power and too little over each other and over the public and private spheres, respectively. The separate-sphere doctrine was less an agreed-on division of labor and more a competition for greater moral influence in which men and women jockeyed for position. Two cults existed side by side, one lauding the virtues of true manhood, the other, true womanhood. Ironically, Freemasons were staunch advocates of the separate-sphere doctrine, not critics, excluding women from the lodge because they thought women ought to be home tending children. Paul Goodman explains that “by excluding women Masons intended no disrespect.”13 At the same time, as Dorothy Ann Lipson sees it, “the structure and the substance of Freemasonry were devoted to the communication of moral knowledge, which . . . was a purpose that impinged on a legitimate sphere of opinion and action by women.”14 How the Masonic husband exercised his lodge-given right to moral suasion at home without trampling on female toes was the problem. The Evangelical solution merely handed the role of moral arbiter and guardian of the home to women. Masons begged to differ, positing a more cooperative albeit hierarchal relationship with the man on top and female partner a close second, lest tensions escalate and the home emasculate fathers and alienate sons. Masonry criticized what it construed to be the potentially disastrous social consequences of generations of young men raised exclusively by women. Women raised exclusively by their mothers, as Mary Ryan has shown, had some problems, too.15 But Masonry could offer little more than a romantic bandage, counseling wives to put their husbands and thus fatherhood on a pedestal. The ideal woman, according to Sarah J. Hale, famous antebellum defender of Freemasonry, was a creature with nothing but “unreserved devotion” for her husband. While he “is abroad in the world, seeking its employments and riches and honors,” she sits “at home and think[s] of him the live long day,” planning “all her arrangements . . . in reference to his return.”16 Interestingly, Hale devoted the bulk of her time to writing and speaking engagements; however, her characterization of the ideal Masonic wife and/or mother as “friend and companion of men,” never judge or adversary, is an apt summary of the Masonic critique of the cult of domesticity. Early Mormonism brushed all this aside and simply opened the doors of its lodge to women. Since both sexes were “priests after the order of the Son of

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God” according to the Mormon Endowment ceremony, it followed that their relationship at home would be more equal, though not totally. The merits of the Mormon solution to the problem of the cult of domesticity may be open to question, but the Book of Mormon laid the groundwork for what at the time was a radical and inclusive alternative to what either Masons or Evangelicals were proposing.   ’   of the Tree of Life, reminiscent of the so-called Journey of the Freemason in the World, those invited to eat at the Acacia include Sariah, who “partake[s] of the fruit also.” This shocking revelation occurs only nineteen pages into the story, Sariah’s mere presence at such a solemn and exclusively male ritual celebration of virtue being extremely problematic from an orthodox Masonic point of view. In fact, Lehi includes the whole family, calling them “with a loud voice” to join him at this Masonic banquet.17 Women in the narrative, who seem only to tag along for the ride, constitute a stream of inclusive consciousness. The invitation extended to Ishmael, his wife, and their daughters is not simply a matter of biological necessity but more of the same veiled inclusiveness in Masonic ritual. In the story of Nephi, loosely modeled after the story of Hiram Abiff, men and women (Laman and Lemuel and their respective wives) play the part of the three fugitive Fellow Craft Masons who murder the Grand Master and hide his body under rubbish on a faraway hill. Men and women (Nephi and Sam and their respective wives) also play the role of the faithful Fellow Crafts. There is no romanticism here: men and women appear on both sides of the Masonic law. Two characters in particular underscore the Book of Mormon’s inclusive tendencies and adoptive agenda—a man and a woman, in fact. Alma, the young priest in the court of wicked king Noah, flees his employ. The murder of a prophet of the Lord, Abinadi, sends him packing. The king sends a military force to kill Alma, who hides, taking the opportunity to “write all the words which Abinadi had spoken” (p. 190). Alma’s flight into the wilderness can be seen as a variant of the Hiram Abiff myth and the instigation of a new Masonic order of the priesthood in the wake of the slaying of (Master Mason) Abinadi (the first three letters of the Book of Mormon name the same as Abiff). Alma “repented of his sins and iniquities, and went about privately among the people, and began to teach the words of Abinadi.” Importantly, “he taught them privately, that it might not come to the knowledge of the king” (p. 191). Then “Alma, having authority from God, ordained priests; every one priest to every fifty of their number did he ordain to preach unto them” (p. 193; emphasis mine). That

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Alma’s congregations do not exceed the number recommended in Morris’s Practical Synopsis of Masonic Law and Usage, which, it says, “should not, in general, exceed fifty or sixty,” can be seen as a none-too-subtle hint rather than mere coincidence, Masonic rather than biblical in origin and tone.18 And lest there be any doubt, the total population of Alma’s church is divisible by fifty, “about four hundred and fifty souls.”19 More important, Alma’s new lodge system, a veritable Masonic priesthood of all believers, clearly includes women. The other major character in the Book of Mormon to propound an adoptive ritual is Abish, the enigmatic servant of a Lamanite queen. The story begins with the travails of the Nephite missionary to the Lamanites, Ammon, who converts their king, Lamoni. One of the king’s servants calls Ammon by another name, “Rabbanah, which is,” the Book of Mormon explains, “powerful, or great king.” It may allude to a password in the Royal Arch Degree, which is “Raboni” and signifies “Good Master, or Most Excellent Master” (p. 276).20 Is Lamoni’s conversion a Masonic raising? The text says he “fell unto the earth, as if he were dead.” Ammon reassures his Lamanite audience that the king is not dead but “sleepeth in God,” having been “carried away in God” (pp. 276–277). The effect is so powerful that Ammon and the entire Lamanite court, including the queen, sink into the same deep (Masonic?) dream state. Enter the queen’s servant girl, Abish, who performs the first Masonic levitation, the queen being the first to come forth (as a Master Mason). The name Abish begins with the same first three letters as Abiff; her character is a female incarnation of Masonry’s first Grand Master in name and deed. What follows is remarkable (from an orthodox Masonic point of view). The queen raises the king. That a “servant” woman “raises” a queen, and then a queen a king, can be seen as a very clever way to address issues of both class and gender in relation to priesthood authority. The Lamanite queen is said to “clasp her hands” before “raising” her husband (p. 279). In the Scottish Rite, as Albert Pike explains, “the clasped hands . . . used by Pathagorus . . . represent the number 10,” a sacred number in Masonry and “among the symbols of the Master’s Degree, where it of right belongs.”21 And lest anyone doubt the intention here, the Book of Mormon states plainly that the mysteries are not the exclusive property of men: “He imparteth his word by angels, unto men; yea, not only men, but women also.”22 These and other instances of the incorporation of women in positive ways into the ritual are not without European Masonic precedent. This is important, for it suggests that Smith was operating outside the bounds of American fraternalism. His real crime may have been his position on the rightful

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place of women in the lodge when U.S. Masonry assumed exclusion to be the best policy. Mormonism was not the first or only adoptive ritual in Masonic history, but it was the first of its kind in the United States. Moreover, the female degrees of the Eastern Star date back no earlier than the 1850s and 1860s. This ritual is built around the heroism of biblical women such as Ruth, Rahab, Esther, Mary, and Martha. The Good Samaritan “who stopped at the wayside to relieve the distressed” is the archetype of the order. Like Mormonism, it came out of Royal Arch Masonry. At first, husbands divulged some of the more benign Masonic secrets to their wives. Then the various signs and passwords were communicated “to a roomful of people at once,” after a formality that merely asked female initiates to respect the oath of secrecy without any other obligations.23 The Eastern Star has five points, one for each of five women of valor in the Bible (one a fictitious character named Electra). Esther’s brave rescue of her people figures prominently in the ritual (pp. 857–868). The Book of Mormon, culminating in the construction of the temple and the endowment, can thus be seen as an early Eastern Star-like inclusion of women, although European, Scottish, and hermetic in the main. These days, the temple endowment has lost much of its original, male mystery. At one time, it even included an oath to avenge the murder of Joseph Smith “by any means.” Only recently has pressure from within led to the removal of the oath of secrecy, blood oaths, and signs, tokens and penalties that seem to have come straight out of Masonry and that apparently one might use to sneak through the pearly gates. Fanny Stenhouse (who describes her experience in the temple as simply an “ordeal”) underscores the sense of awe and mystery, indeed “fear,” that the nineteenth-century ritual evoked.24 Women of social standing in the early days of the church, like Fanny, were oblivious to its feminist possibilities. The temple, she writes, “united, man and woman, making one perfect creature . . . partakers of the plenitude of every blessing.” Going on, she confesses “how absolutely needful it was that [her] husband and [herself] would become partakers of those mysteries” (p. 189; emphasis in original). What frightened her most was not polygamy so much as “blood-curdling oaths” that she had no doubt “would be sternly enforced” (p. 190). Not only did the temple include women, but women empowered women (mostly out of respect for modesty, mind you). Fanny was “anointed” by a woman, the venerable “Miss Eliza R. Snow, the poetess, and a Mrs. Whitney” washed her from head to toe, consecrated her with olive oil, and blessed her

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with good health, wisdom, and eternal life (pp. 193–194). Was there anything quite so radical, so ostensibly feminist, in Evangelical or Masonic circles in America? In the main ceremony, Fanny witnessed husbands and wives, men and women, made equal partakers of the new and everlasting covenant. In the end, though, her account does little more than poke fun at the ritual’s primary symbol, finding laughable “a small real evergreen, and a few branches of dried raisins . . . hung upon it as fruit” (p. 196)—failing to see the connection to the acacia.25 Had she read her Book of Mormon, she might not have been so critical, so incredulous, quite so transparently unfair and uninformed. Mr. T. B. H. Stenhouse only wanted for his beloved Fanny what Lehi had loudly proclaimed and offered to his family—to come and sup with him at the table of manhood. Poor Fanny! She lost her nerve and then pointed an accusing Evangelical finger once safely in the arms of Jesus to the east, failing in the end to remove herself completely from the Masonic dreamworld of Mormondom.

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II

the quest within the quest

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  Arnold Friberg, Captain Moroni Raises the Title of Liberty The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).

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a bible! a bible! we have got a bible

“Do you believe in the Bible?” If we do, we are the only people under heaven that does, for there are none of the religious sects of the day that do. “Wherein do you differ from other sects?” In that we believe the Bible, and all other sects profess to believe their interpretations of the Bible and their creeds. . . . “Is there anything in the Bible which licenses you to believe in revelation now-a-days?” Is there anything that does not authorize us to believe so? If there is, we have, as yet, not been able to find it. “Is not the canon of the Scriptures full?” If it is, there is a great defect in the book, or else it would have said so. —Joseph Smith Jr.

, -  of the Book of Mormon reveals a nuanced biblical subtext. Importantly, the Book of Mormon quotes extensively and directly from the King James Version: Exodus 20:2–4, 3–17; Isaiah 2–14; 48:1–49:26; 52:7–15; 53:1–12; 54:1–17; Micah 4:12–13; 5:8–11; Malachi 3, 4; and Matthew 5–7. In some cases, the wording has been altered slightly. Many such emendations are of the italicized words in the Authorized Version. As Wesley P. Walters shows, the Old Testament passages quoted in the Book of Mormon support Smith’s eschatological views.1 The books of Nephi quote extensively from the Book of Isaiah, castigating the atheism, hedonism, and intellectualism of the rich and mighty.2 The Book of Mormon Jesus repeats verbatim the Sermon on the Mount, driving home the need for a global, transcontinental awakening.3 There can be little doubt concerning the origin of no less than one hundred and fifty proper names in the Book of Mormon—nearly half the total in the corpus—since they correspond exactly to those in the King James Version.4 Apologists maintain that Smith merely “made a concerted attempt to retain the biblical (King James) spelling wherever the name was already known from the Bible, while he newly transliterated all other names.”5 There has been considerable debate over the possible origin of the remaining two hundred names. Blake Ostler argues that although they “could be biblical variants, [some] are difficult to explain as Joseph Smith’s inventions.”6 Critics are quick to conclude that Smith invented them, a process one scholar has termed “graphic glosso-

A

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lalia.”7 Brodie first thought they could all be explained as “Biblical names with slight changes in spelling or additions of syllables.”8 She is quite right, of course.9 However, these and other biblicisms can be seen as having a Masonic origin, too. The Book of Mormon alludes instead to various fraternal rituals and emblems; its manifold corrections of and departures from the King James Version can be seen as Masonic, aimed at a very specific antebellum audience with a predilection toward singing the praises of the Bible—but in a decidedly antiEvangelical key. Masons believe in the Bible, but, not unlike Mormons, “only as far as it is translated correctly” (the eighth article of faith in Mormonism). “Every well governed Lodge,” Webb writes, “is furnished with the Holy Bible, the Square, and the Compass.”10 Carnes points out that the ritual of the Odd Fellows (an order established in 1819) consists entirely of passages taken directly from the Bible and biblical paraphrases. “Yet the early ritualists,” he explains, “did not hesitate to modify Scripture to suit their purposes.”11 The lecture for the Royal Arch Degree in Webb also cuts and pastes from the Bible, paying no mind to chronology, beginning with Exodus 3:1–6, then 2 Chronicles 36:11–20 and Ezra 1:1–3, then back to Exodus 3:13–14, then on to Psalms 141, 142, and 143, more from Exodus—this time 4:1–10—then Haggai 2:1–9, 23, Zechariah 4:6–10, a passage—surprisingly—from the New Testament, John 1:1–5, and then back in time yet again, to Deuteronomy 31:24–26, Exodus 25:21, 16:32–34, and Numbers 17:10, then ahead in time to Hebrews 9:2–5, then back to Amos 9:11, and finally back to Exodus 6:2–3. Indeed, the perennial complaint from literary quarters—that the Book of Mormon is a pastiche of biblical citation and paraphrase—does not take into account that this might be a direct result of a mimetic agenda rather than simply poor writing. Readers familiar with the stilted prose of the Royal Arch lecture and its recapitulation of the biblical story of Moses and the flight from Egypt and journey to the promised land might well find the Book of Mormon to move along nicely. One can see, however, why it might seem little more than plagiarism of the Bible to those for whom Masonic legend is a complete mystery. The Book of Ether, a chapter book of sorts that appears near the end of the Book of Mormon, contains the account of an extinct and ancient race of people who came to the new world to escape the destruction around the time of the Tower of Babel. This record of their exploits and eventual destruction has been discovered by a second wave of immigrants who fled Jerusalem just before the Babylonian onslaught and thus escaped captivity—which is why it appears nearer to the end of the Book of Mormon than at the beginning where it

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perhaps belongs. If only the Book of Mormon had been written in the concise prose featured in Ether! The remaining fourteen chapter books that make up the Book of Mormon seem woefully inadequate by comparison. Ether, the last of the Jaredite prophets, documents the tragic downfall of his people, a chosen race granted respite at the Tower of Babel. They emigrate to America and become a mighty and powerful nation under God. Like the ancient Israelites, the Jaredites are plagued by corrupt leadership. Numerous secret societies also threaten the peace, security, and well-being of this covenant people. In an effort to stem the tide of wickedness, God sends prophets to remind them of their sacred obligations. They repent and peace is restored. Still, in the end, the Jaredites are destroyed as punishment from on high for individual and collective sin. The account of the events leading to their downfall either paraphrases or quotes the Bible verbatim. For example, The Book of Ether claims to be the record of a “people who were destroyed . . . at the time the Lord confounded the languages of the people.” This is a slight emendation of Genesis 11:9, which says “the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth.” In Ether, the Lord confounds “the languages of the people,” a point of clarification that contradicts the Bible’s contention that only one language existed before the confusion of tongues. This is the first of several departures from the logic and wording of the Bible. The Lord, Ether says, “swore in his wrath that they should be scattered . . . and according to the word of the Lord the people were scattered.” The brother of Jared, the main character in the drama, pleads on behalf of friends and family. This seems to be an allusion to Abraham and his plea on behalf of the wicked of Sodom (see Genesis 18:23–33). And so the Etheric scenario is more familial and sanitary—less problematic from a moral standpoint. The brother of Jared is instructed to inquire of God “whether he will drive us out of the land,” turning Exodus 6:1 on its head. Like the biblical Noah, the brother of Jared is then admonished to gather together “male and female of every kind.” He gathers “seed of the earth,” either a rationalization of Genesis 6:21 (“all food that is eaten”) or a new reading for Genesis 7:3 (“to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth”).12 The references in Ether to “fowls of the air” and “swarms of bees” hark back to Genesis 6:20, where Noah is commanded to bring “fowls after their kind” and “every creeping thing of the earth after his kind.” The Jaredites journey into the wilderness, like the Israelites in the Old Testament. They travel “down into the valley of Nimrod,” which is said to border the wilderness. Similarly, the Israelites flee Egypt and camp “in Etham, in the

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  Jewel of an Ark Mariner Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:104.

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edge of the wilderness” (Exodus 13:20). In Ether, God “go[es] before [the Jaredites] . . . in a cloud” and gives “directions whither they should travel,” a paraphrase of Exodus 13:21: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way.” The Deity appears to the brother of Jared in a cloud. Like Moses, too, he is not permitted to look him in the face. The departures might be viewed simply as minor criticism and a slight steadying of the Ark. In the Book of Ether, God is said to “talk with them,” that is, the people as a whole—a democratization of the biblical understanding of divine revelation. Exodus 19:9 reads: “And the LORD said unto Moses, Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with thee.” The Israelites simply witness the “thunder and lightnings” atop Mount Sinai, a sign of God’s communication with Moses (Exodus 19:16 ff.). They do not actually hear Him talk to Moses. The Jaredites, on the other hand, are privy. Not unlike Noah, the brother of Jared builds a vessel to escape the discord. He quickly finds himself suspended between the horns of an engineering dilemma, however, for the airtight watercraft that will carry himself, his family, and others to the land of promise have no apparent means of illumination. This design flaw is resolved by inviting the Deity to touch sixteen luminescent stones that will provide light for the long sea journey. Another departure from the Noachian narrative? A slight modification to the Noachian ark in the Bible—which had windows? Perhaps the construction of the Jaredite barges alludes to Jonah’s aquatic incarceration in the belly of a great fish. “What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?” the Almighty explains to the brother of Jared, “For behold, ye cannot have windows, for they will be dashed in pieces. . . . For behold, ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea.” Such eccentricities may not be simple biblical revamping but Masonic recitative based on the Bible, that in the Master Mason and Royal Arch Degrees in particular. The Tower of Babel, for example, has special significance for Masons. It is the legend of the Twenty-first Degree of the Scottish Rite, or the order of the Noachites, and an important symbol of the craft in general. In fraternal legend, its destruction signals the moment darkness fell on all mankind as a consequence of pride and ambition. Masonry may reach back to the Garden of Eden, but it began at Babel. In Masonic lore, a period of peace and harmony preceded the confusion of tongues—the direct result of an infusion of Master Masons from the East. Mackey explains in his Lexicon of Freemasonry that after the flood “man again rebelled, and as a punishment of his rebellion, at the lofty tower of Babel, language was confounded, and masonry lost. . . .

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 a Moses Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, ), :b;

The patriarchs, however, were saved from the general moral desolation and still preserved true masonry, or the knowledge of [the unity of God and immortality of the soul] in the patriarchal line.”13 Noah is the titular head of the true Masonry that was not confounded. “Noachite Masonry,” Mackey points out, “date the commencement of their order from this destruction,” not to be confused with “Spurious Freemasonry” that also originates at Babel (p. 30). In other words, the separation of Masonry

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 b Arnold Friberg, Brother of Jared in the presence of the Deity The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).

into Noachite and anti-Noachite at the time of the Tower of Babel can be seen as a twin birth that not unlike that of Jacob and Esau spawns a bitter rivalry. The flip side of this is “the ancient practice of Masons conversing without the use of speech” by means of hieroglyphics and symbols, claiming to “possess an universal language which men of all languages can understand.”14 Templars communicate using a secret system of Egyptian characters; a facsimile appears in Arkon Daraul’s book, Secret Societies.15 In the order of the High Priesthood of Thebes, the initiate is taught “the peculiar hierogrammatical script” (p. 132).

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In the Third Section of the Master Mason Degree, the beehive and ark are important emblems, the former symbolic of industry, the latter, Webb explains, “emblematic of that divine ark which safely wafts us over this tempestuous sea of troubles.”16 Mackey’s discussion of the Noachites in Masonic legend casts light on the barges. Noah’s aquatic journey is pregnant with Masonic possibility. Mackey explains: “The entrance into initiation was symbolic of his entrance into the vessel of salvation; his detention in the ark was represented by darkness and the pastos, coffin, or couch in which the aspirant was placed; and the exit of Noah, after the forty days of deluge, was seen in the manifestation of the candidate, when, being fully tried and proved, he was admitted to full light, amid the rejoicings of the surrounding initiates, who received him in the sacellum or holy place.”17 The sixteen luminescent stones may allude to the pot of incense, said to “glow with fervent heat” and symbolic of the pure heart of the initiate, or simply to the lodge candles, its only source of light. As Clegg explains, “a singular regulation is that there shall be no artificial light in the Lodge-room.”18 Hence the barges (or rather lodges) are lit using supernatural light. Normally, there are three candles, not two, but then again the Jaredite barges may be lodges of the esoteric (Scottish or Egyptian?) kind. If so, then perhaps each is given its own Urim and Thummim to provide the illumination required to make the long and perilous journey. A white stone is also the symbol of the Mark Degree in the York and American Rites, where a passage in Revelation is the text: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, and no man knoweth, saving he that receiveth it.”19 In the Masonic ritual, it is said to represent the Covenant that the initiate makes with the Creator. This does not explain, however, why there are two such stones per lodge, unless, perhaps, one is for males and one for females. The brother of Jared’s epiphany has a Masonic ring to it as well. His great faith and purity of heart permit him to stare Jehovah in the face and thus discover firsthand that the God of the Old Testament is the spirit of the preexistent Christ. And what might this be? Perhaps a burning bush episode in the style of the Royal Arch ceremony, where an unseen Mason impersonates the Deity and the initiate Moses? (This ceremony, incidentally, horrified Evangelicals because Masons, mere men, took on the persona of divine beings.)20 Be that as it may, the Jaredites arrive in America at long last. Theirs is the first of three such Puritan-like transplantations, their meteoric rise and fall from

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grace blamed on “secret combinations,” an “apostate priesthood order,” we are told, that traces its origins to Cain. Its tenacity and uncanny ability to insinuate itself into Noachite society—Jaredite and then Nephite—becomes the raison d’être and moral locus of the larger narrative. The daughter of Jared concocts a scheme to murder the aging king, Omer, so that his son and her father will inherit the throne. She seduces Omer’s best friend, Akish, the price of sleeping with her being the head of poor unsuspecting Omer (an inoffensive chap by all accounts). The events surrounding Omer’s beheading recall that of John the Baptist in the New Testament. Elements of the seduction of Samson by Delilah are there, too—another classic Masonic proof text.21 Omer’s murder by his best friend recalls Abel’s slaying by a dear brother, Cain, and becomes the basis for a counterfeit male order. The daughter of Jared shares her bed and her knowledge of a secret order dating back to Babel “that . . . by their secret plans,” she explains, “did obtain kingdoms and great glory.”22 Akish’s adultery is his adoption into the ranks of Spurious Masonry. He makes a pact with Jared’s “kinfolk” who not only “sware unto him” but take an oath “handed down even from Cain, who was a murderer from the beginning” (pp. 553–554). This unholy band is “kept up by the power of the devil to administer these oaths unto the people” and is the origin of the so-called secret combinations (p. 554). All this comes to us not from Evangelical sources alone but from contemporary Masonic ones too. Once again, the Bible and the Bible alone is not the whole story. George Oliver, Knight Templar and premier nineteenth-century exponent of such romantic fancy, spoke for many when he wrote: The Rites of the Science which is now received under the appellation of Freemasonry were exercised in the antediluvian world, received by Noah after the flood, practised by man at the building of Babel, conveniences for which were undoubtedly contained in that edifice, and at the dispersion spread with every settlement, already deteriorated by the gradual innovations of Cabiric priests, and moulded into a form, the great outlines of which are distinctly to be traced in the Mysteries of every heathen nation, exhibiting the shattered remains of one true system whence they were derived.23

Oliver’s ideas were indebted to the writings of G. S. Faber, in particular his widely read 1816 tome The Origin of Pagan Idolatry, which accused Masons of building the Tower of Babel in the first place.24 Oliver’s was a more positive spin on Masonic involvement, blaming the fiasco on a clandestine element.25

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  Arnold Friberg, Young Nephi Subdues His Rebellious Brothers The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).

Masonic invention like Oliver’s can be seen as a more likely parallel for the Book of Mormon’s discussion of the secret societies that it means to criticize. In one Masonic encyclopedia, secret societies are defined as “members [who] take any oath binding them to engage in mutiny or sedition, or disturb[ing] the peace, or whose members and officers are concealed from society at large [and] have been declared unlawful in various countries.”26 Masons are the arch enemies of all who would pervert secrecy and oath taking. Ramsay, it is worth noting, thought that Cromwell’s Fifth Monarchy Men were “Assassins of the

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Third Degree” and believed Charles I to be a modern-day victim of latter-day Saracens—disturbers of the public peace writ large (1:109). The Book of Ether thus offers a variety of clues on how to read the Book of Mormon. Placing it at the end, rather than at the beginning, may not have been the best strategy in hindsight, but regardless it operates very much like the Book of Exodus in the Pentateuch: it is the basis for everything before and after. One reads Genesis with Exodus in mind; so, too, reading the first two books of Nephi (First and Second Nephi) with full comprehension requires a certain prescience. Having read Ether, the Book of Mormon’s overarching Masonic-Evangelical agenda is less likely to be misconstrued as exclusively one or the other. Ether also alerts us to the fact that the pattern of escape, flight, and resettlement throughout constitutes a series of Royal Arch–like epic journeys in the never-ending male search for the long-lost book, the key to greater concord along gender lines in a world turned upside down by scheming Masonic men and Evangelical women.

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seven

the search for the long lost book in the book of mormon “How and where did you obtain the Book of Mormon?” Moroni, who deposited the plates in a hill in Manchester, Ontario County, New York, being dead and raised again therefrom, appeared unto me, and told me where they were, and gave me directions how to obtain them. I obtained them, and the Urim and Thummim with them, by the means of which I translated the plates; and thus came the Book of Mormon. —Joseph Smith Jr.

   , the first of fifteen books in the Book of Mormon, pick up where the Book of Ether leaves off. Another exodus. Another beheading. Yet another Noachian sojourn and protracted fall from grace. Another Masonic battle to the death, too. The Jaredites destroy each other, and the Nephites are wiped off the face of the earth by their brothers, the Lamanites. The journey begins with a Hebrew prophet named Lehi who flees Jerusalem before the Babylonian incursion, taking his family with him. Lehi is a visionary. I have already discussed how his dream of the Tree of Life expounds the so-called Journey of the Freemason in the World. His journey to the promised land and the events that lead to the extermination of half his posterity can also be seen as one long Masonic recitative based on the Royal Arch quest for the lost book of the Law. Nestled safely in a wilderness camp, Lehi has already tipped his hand in some respects, for pitching a tent just three days from the Holy City is precisely what any Knight Templar (worth his salt, that is) is supposed to do and where he ought to make camp. As Clegg explains:

T

The tent, which constitutes a part of the paraphernalia of furniture of a Commandery of Knights Templar, is not only intended for a practical use, but also has symbolic meaning. The Order of the Templars was instituted for the protection of Christian pilgrims who were visiting the sepulcher of their Lord. The Hospitalers might remain in the city and fulfil their vows by attendance on the sick, but

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the Templar must away to the plains, the hills, and the desert, there, in his lonely tent, to watch the wily Saracen, and to await the lonely pilgrim, to whom he might offer the crust of bread and the draft of water, and instruct him in his way, and warn him of danger, and give him words of good cheer.

The Templar, as Lehi surely does, turns his back on luxury and wealth, giving all he has to any passersby. “Such events as these,” Clegg continues, “are commemorated in the tent scenes of the Templar ritual.”1 That Lehi erects an “altar of stones” is another clue to the precise reason— Masonic through and through—for his wilderness retreat.2 Stone worship, not surprisingly, gets the nod in Clegg as well. (That Masons would worship stone seems obvious.) “The influence of this old stone-worship, but of course divested of its idolatrous spirit, and developed into the system of symbolic instruction,” he writes, “is to be found in Freemasonry, where the reference to sacred stones is made in the Foundation-Stone, the Cubical Sone, the Corner-Stone, and some other symbols of a similar character.”3 A stone altar will not do in the long term, however. Indeed, for Lehi to do his job (as Grand Master), he requires the services of a good monitor. And so he must send his sons (Laman, Lemuel, and Nephi) on a quest back to the wicked city, ostensibly to reacquire a family genealogy, written on (brass) plates in the possession of a capricious uncle named Laban. And if there is anything to the names of the Book of Mormon, it may not be a coincidence that Laban in the Bible (Jacob’s father-in-law) is a distant relative. The Hebrew root from which the name derives means “white.” It can also be translated as “to make brick”—the sort of Hebrew word and biblical proper noun a Mason might be inclined to know and want to make more out of than perhaps is merited.4 In Masonic parlance, “laban” is the word for the white lambskin apron of the Master Mason. In the Knight of the Sun, or Twenty-eighth Degree of the Scottish Rite, Laban is the proper name given to “all carnal concupiscence” (taking its cue from the Sohar) which “will be whitened of its impurity.”5 Interestingly, Nephesch is the name of its spiritual counterpart in this degree (p. 757). However one views this, Laban’s name denotes something Masonic. As the story unfolds, the plan is to get Laban to relinquish his copy of the genealogy—which turns out to be the Torah—for a tidy sum of Lehi’s entire savings. Nephi and his brothers go “down to the land of [their] inheritance” and “gather together gold, and silver, and precious things,” the first of several Royal Arch treasure hunts. In the meantime, Laban hatches a plot to rob them of their gold and silver, along with their lives. His young nephews do not see any-

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thing coming, holding up their end of the bargain but leaving empty handed, hiding in the cavity of a rock (an allusion to the burning bush episode in the Royal Arch ritual). All seems lost. Laman and Lemuel grow angry with Nephi for refusing to give up. An angel appears just in time to stop Nephi’s murder at their hands (an allusion to the murder of the Master Mason Hiram Abiff). There is no need to squabble, the angel assures them: the Lord will deliver Laban into their hands (just as he delivered Pharaoh into the hands of the ancient Israelites, in effect). Nephi screws up his courage and returns to Laban’s house under cover of night to find his uncle “drunken with wine.” Another divine communication constrains Nephi to remove Laban’s “head with his own sword” (here we go again, except that this decapitation has the permission of the Deity and thus the blessing of Masonry). Nephi puts on Laban’s armor as a disguise and asks the servant of the house, Zoram, to take him to the “treasury.” After securing the brass plates, Nephi invites Zoram to follow him “without the walls” of the city (where Laman and Lemuel wait anxiously). At first, Nephi’s brothers imagine Laban has come to kill them. Nephi explains that it is he. Nephi buys Zoram’s silence with a promise of freedom and seals it with an oath of allegiance. When he and his brothers present the plates to Lehi, we are told that their family history and the Torah are one and the same. Here, too, the text tips its hand. Nephi and his brothers have just come back from a Royal Arch-like quest for the lost, or in this case almost lost, book of the Law. The story of Laban—nestled in the middle of the Masonic allegory of the Tree of Life and the veiled Masonic raisings of Lehi and his sons—recounts the unfortunate but unavoidable execution of a Masonic miscreant and corruptor of the order. Laban is a high-ranking city elder of the Masonic kind. “Behold [Laban] is a mighty man,” Laman and Lemuel bitterly complain, “he can command fifty, yea, even he can slay fifty; then why not us?”6 The number fifty, as I have already mentioned, can be interpreted as a cipher for a Masonic assembly—Spurious or Cainite, in this case.7 However, Laban’s beheading is an important clue to the precise nature of the book’s hidden Masonic agenda. Brooke points out, for example, that the decapitation of Laban resembles the story in the Templar ritual of “a sword being used to behead a sleeping enemy.”8 In the Chivalric ritual for the High Priesthood of Thebes, the aspirant is “handed a sword and told that he must cut off the head of the next person he [meets] in the cave and bring it back to the king.” The Theban initiate is also instructed to seize his victim by the hair.9 In the Knights Templar ritual, as described in Mackey, the initiate is struck on the neck (ever so lightly) with his own sword.10 In the Royal Arch Degree, the symbolism is clearly spelled out:

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  Wavy, or Flaming, Sword of the Tiler Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:359.

“The stiff neck of the disobedient shall be cut off by the sword of human justice, to avert . . .” (the rest is blotted out).11 Laban is the first person Nephi encounters after his return to the city. He takes Laban “by the hair of the head” when performing the grisly surgery.12 In the Templar ritual, again in Mackey, after the beheading ceremony the initiate is “clothed with the various pieces of his armor, the emblematic sense of which [is] explained to him.”13 In Alexander Slade’s eighteenth-century anti-Masonic polemic The Freemason Examin’d, the ritual is satirized for “stripping” the aspirant before clothing him in his Masonic attire.14 The instrument of Laban’s destruction, his own sword, is another important clue to the book’s hidden Templar agenda. “And I beheld his sword,” Nephi says, “and the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceeding fine; and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel.”15 The description of Laban’s sword may be an allusion to the no less ornamented “Flaming Sword of the Tiler,” pictured in figure 34. It should always be drawn, and the Tiler ready at all times to safeguard the treasury of the lodge against “cowans” who hope to abscond with any of its Masonic vestments and other “furniture.” Laban is not only asleep at his post, but falling-down drunk in the street, making him a rather poor excuse for a Tiler, indeed. That he pays for this with his life is harsh and rather undignified, but the punishment presented in the Templar ritual, in fact!

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Nephi, however, is constrained (by no less than an angel) to murder Laban in his sleep. His scruples are consistent with those of a Knight Templar, who must never shed innocent blood. In the American Templar oath, the aspirant pledges to pursue “a warfare which requires no swords, demands the shedding of no blood save the cross of Him who went about doing good.”16 Yet there comes a time when the peace-loving Christian Knight must of necessity engage in conventional warfare lest he break another oath: to defend the weak against the machinations of the strong. Laban’s refusal to hand over the genealogy (for a fair price) threatens Nephi and his posterity. Without the scriptures, they are likely to forget their covenant with the Creator. (The Mulekites, contemporaries who also flee Jerusalem but without the Torah in hand, fall into disbelief shortly after arriving in America.) Laban’s death is not unwarranted. Beheading, moreover, is the ultimate penalty for not honoring one’s fraternal vows. Laban is thus a fallen Christian Knight of the highest order and is executed accordingly. Nephi’s handling of the servant, Zoram, is also consistent with Templar practice, that is, habeas corpus of the medieval, chivalrous kind. Zoram is oathbound. When Nephi says, “Our fears did cease concerning him,” it is largely because Zoram is bound by an oath.17 “An oath or promise of a Knight, is of all oaths and promises,” one Masonic monitor states, “the most inviolable and binding.” It goes on to explain that “Knights taken in battle engaged to come of their own accord to prison, whenever it was required by their captors, and on their word of honor they were allowed liberty for the time, and no one ever doubted that they would fulfil their engagements.”18 As a junior-ranking Christian Knight, Zoram’s word is his bond. The story of Nephi, his two brothers, Laman and Lemuel, and their altercation with Laban so closely parallels the story of the Knights of the Red Cross (in Webb’s Masonic monitor, in particular) that it may be more than mere homology. The Red Cross Degree is based on the biblical story of the return of the Jewish exiles to the Holy City under the tutelage of “Captain” Zerubabbel. Nephi and his brothers “go down to the land of [their] inheritance” to gather their gold and silver and “precious things.”19 This could allude to the “vessels also of gold and silver of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took out of the temple that was in Jerusalem,” or the search of the “king’s treasure-house” and the return of all confiscated Jewish relics at the behest of the Persian conqueror, Cyrus. It might be argued that the Book of Mormon story comes straight out of the Bible were it not for the presence of so many apocryphal tropes that are also in Webb. Perhaps the Book of Mormon merely takes its cue from Josephus, Webb’s inspiration, too. In his Freemason’s Monitor, Webb writes: “Darius, while he was

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yet a private man, made a vow to God, that if ever he came to the throne, he would send all the holy vessels that were at Babylon back again to Jerusalem.”20 This ostensibly imaginative reconstruction is in Josephus’ Antiquity of the Jews.21 In Webb, another fanciful tale appears that is also in Josephus, the story of how Zerubabbel beguiled Darius to keep his vow and return “the holy vessels remaining in his possession” to their rightful owners. The artifice of Nephi in the face of Laban’s recalcitrance seems patterned roughly after the apocryphal story of Zerubabbel and Darius. Smith certainly had access to The Antiquity of the Jews, as there was a copy in the Manchester library (near his home) a decade or more before the Book of Mormon appeared. As I have suggested, however, there is no reason to suppose that he read it; instead, he may have got the skinny on the book through conversing with someone who had. That said, the Book of Mormon contains extrapolations that are unique to Webb and not found in either Josephus or the Old Testament. For example, in Webb’s account, the construction of the walls of the city of Jerusalem is interrupted briefly by an Arabian force. This Persian guard in medieval Saracen garb threatens to stop construction by slaying any and all (stone) masons, thus bringing to an end the restoration of God’s people. Fearful for their lives, they hide “in the lower places behind the wall” but are told, “Be not afraid . . . remember the Lord, which is great and terrible.”22 “Then Darius the king,” it says, “made a decree, and search was made in the house of the rolls, where the treasures were laid up in Babylon.” One may compare this to the story of Nephi’s brothers outside the walls of the city, hiding in the cavity of a rock lest they be detected and murdered by an avenging (Saracen) army, given angelic words of encouragement, and so on. A more detailed account in Thomas Sargant’s The Royal Arch Companion says that “three Sojourners” traveled to Jerusalem on a quest to discover their genealogy. Reading it, they delight in the discovery that they descend from noble stock. Excavating near the temple, they discover a vault. “All being equally anxious who should descend, they cast lots; the lot fell upon ———.”23 They discover a “scroll” but, because of the darkness, are “unable to read its contents” (p. 89). Is this not the gist of the Book of Mormon story? Three sojourners are named—Laman, Lemuel and Nephi—who “consult one with another; and . . . cast lots,” it says, “which of [them] should go in unto the house of Laban. And it came to pass that the lot fell upon Laman.”24 But poor Laman is not quite up to the task (making a hasty retreat the first sign of trouble), and so the job falls to Nephi. There seems no option left but to murder Laban and steal his armor (all done according to Templar custom). Beating a path to the

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“treasury,” Nephi makes his descent into its vault and recovers the brass plates—the Torah, it turns out (an allusion to the scroll in the Royal Arch story?), which cannot be read (an allusion to Smith’s reading disability?) without the aid of supernatural intervention. Laban’s character, as I have said, seems patterned after that of the “Tiler,” an officer of the lodge with one specific calling: “to guard against the approach of cowans and eavesdroppers.” At the installation of the Tiler, “a sword is placed in [his] hands” so that he might “admonish the Brethren to set a guard over their thoughts . . . a sentinel over their actions, thereby preventing the approach of every unworthy thought or deed.”25 In fact, the Tiler’s concave, where “the ornaments, furniture, jewels and other regalia are deposited” (including the Ark of the Covenant), is also called the “treasury” (pp. 48–49). Nephi and his brothers can be seen or misconstrued (in Laban’s case) as “cowans and eavesdroppers,” too. That their uncle dispatches an armed guard to kill them for merely asking for what is rightfully theirs—the brass plates—is not simply heavy-handed but an overly literal interpretation of the Tiler’s role as protector of the lodge. Nephi impersonates Laban in order to gain entrance not simply to some vault but to the lodge—which may say something about the lengths to which Smith had to go to gain access to the mysteries of Masonry. While it is tempting to suppose that Nephi breaks into Laban’s house, a lodge break-in of the Royal Arch kind (descent into the vault where the plates of Enoch and scriptures are stored) may be something (Masonic) readers do not need to have spelled out for them. The theft, not unlike Laban’s killing, is a necessary evil. Payback for William Morgan’s murder may explain why Nephi is commanded to murder his uncle in cold blood. Other Masonic furnishings ought to catch our eye, such as a compass that magically appears outside Lehi’s tent one morning, the so-called liahona.26 This will guide Lehi and his family (and another family, composed entirely of girls, that they adopt and take with them out of necessity) on the journey to the promised land. The liahona is a compass, but not in any orthodox Masonic sense. The Masonic compass is an open protractor, not a set of spiritually magnetized needles suspended inside a brass ball that might be said to point due west—but only so long as everyone behaves. Another type of compass in the Book of Mormon does fit the description of the Masonic variety, however. In early Masonic rituals, the compasses (plural) are the property of the Master alone and symbolic of the sun. As Clegg explains, this Masonic compass “is more usually applied to the magnetic needle and circular dial or card of the mariner from which he directs his course over the seas . . . when seeking his

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 a Arnold Friberg, Lehi Discovers the Liahona The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966)

destination across unknown territory.”27 Liahona may also be a corrupt spelling or metathesis of Elion, one of the secret names for God in the esoteric Masonic tradition (2:695).    , the Book of Mormon account is no mere plagiarism based on contemporary Masonic sources or events; it is as distinct from Webb as Webb is from Josephus and Josephus is from the Old Testament—although the parallels are striking and provide us with an important clue to the narrative’s overarching Masonic or Templar agenda, whether it is a lineal descendant or not. The Royal Arch quest for lost scripture, taking place in the wake of desolation and followed by the restoration of the people of God and rebuilding of the holy city, will be told and retold. The Book of Mormon is a very long book, the original edition numbering almost six hundred pages. That it tends to be on the sleepy side may not be due to its copious use of the Bible but

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 b The Order of the Gold- and Rose-Croix Erich J. Lindner, The Royal Art Illustrated (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1976), p. 167.

instead to a highly nuanced and progressive unveiling of its own unique Masonic agenda, the quest for the long-lost book and all that entails being a means to some greater, post-Masonic end. The Book of Mormon embellishes, indeed spins its own yarn, using but a single motif: the quest for the long-lost book of all the Law. Lehi and his family travel to the promised land and complete the Masonic cycle. Nephi dies, and not long afterward it is time, once again, for a pilgrimage

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to the holy city in quest of some lost record of a once-great people. The Book of Mosiah picks up where the books of Nephi leave off. A full account of Mosiah’s tenure as Nephite philosopher-king is preempted by a tale of woe, the socalled Record of Zeniff, which recounts the exploits of a party of Nephite dissenters living among their Lamanite brethren to the north in the land of Nephi-Lehi (the land to the south and Zarahemla are the abode of the Nephites). The location may indicate an unconscious aversion on the part of the author for the north, but the intention may not be simply to disrespect Canada (as has been the American custom and vice versa).28 Rather, as Oliver explains in his Masonic handbook entitled The Book of the Lodge, “Masonically . . . the north [is] a place of darkness.”29 The people of Zeniff have given themselves over to a wicked king, the enigmatic “wicked King Noah,” and eventually to a Lamanite potentate. (The Book of Mormon seems to slander the biblical Noah; however, the bone it has to pick may be with his Masonic or Noachite priestly descendants—a distinction that is easily lost in the shuffle. The allusion may be Masonic, not biblical, a clever polemic attacking the moral bankruptcy of the Masonic establishment of antebellum New York.) Meanwhile, Mosiah sends sixteen strong men, led by Ammon, to inquire after the safety of the Nephite dissenters. They are under house arrest, prisoners in their own city, their leader, Limhi, reduced to gatekeeper and publican against his will. Ammon takes three men with him in an attempt to sneak past the sentinels at the entrance of the city but is accosted outside the city’s walls and thrown in prison. Not to worry: the story has a happy ending, with Ammon liberated and then liberator. Limhi can be seen as in the type of Laban, but he does not follow Laban’s example. Ammon’s character seems patterned after that of the archetypical Nephi. Laban and Limhi are both gatekeepers. Both own sacred histories written on metal plates. Nephi and Ammon are both sent to recover such records. In both instances, an altercation takes place outside the walls of some great city, involving three voyagers on a quest to liberate humankind. But the two stories end very differently. Limhi complies, happily handing his copy of “the plates which contained the record of his people from the time they left the land of Zarahemla” over to his cousin, Ammon.30 He even gives Ammon a second genealogy, that of a lost people written on twenty-four gold plates, also in his possession. The people of Limhi will mount a successful escape, we are told, plying their Lamanite guards with wine and then slipping past them out “the back side of the city” (p. 201). Intoxication, it will be recalled, was the key to Nephi’s success and Laban’s undoing, too.

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The substance and origin of the twenty-four plates cannot be known right away, requiring the linguistic expertise of a prophet—Mosiah, in this case. Ammon defers to the Nephite High Priest Mosiah, who is qualified as a “seer,” to make such secret things manifest “and hidden things . . . come to light” (p. 173). The voyagers in the Royal Arch story are “requested to read the . . . plate of pure gold, on which were certain letters forming words, which [they] humbly conceived to be the Sacred Word itself,” but they “refused, stating that according to Jewish law, it was not lawful for anyone to pronounce the Sacred and Mysterious Name of the Most High, excepting the High Priest, and then only once in the year, when he stood before the Ark of the Covenant to make propitiation for the sins of Israel.”31 To be sure, Ammon has his own compelling reasons to exercise discretion, for he is not a seer. Later, Mosiah informs us that the twenty-four gold plates are the last will and testament of the Jaredites. Moroni will later publish them as the Book of Ether. Limhi explains to Ammon that a search party of his own, sent to Zarahemla to get help, inadvertently journeyed to a “land which was covered with bones of men, and of beasts, &c., and was also covered with ruins of buildings of every kind; having discovered a land which had been peopled with a people, which were as numerous as the hosts of Israel.”32 It is a scene worthy of the Royal Arch and its condemnation of ancient Israel. “You have now witnessed the mournful desolation of Zion,” it says, “the sack and destruction of the city and Temple of our God, and the utter loss, as the world supposed, of all those articles contained in the Holy of Holies.”33 Limhi’s scouts return with “breast-plates” and “swords,” too, whose “hilts thereof hath perished,”34 alluding to the carnage at Jerusalem some eighteen centuries later—the genocide of the Knights Templar by a superior and entrenched Saracen army during the Crusades. Ammon leads Limhi and the people of Zeniff back to Zarahemla (the Jerusalem of the New World). They must traverse rugged terrain under cover of night, a Babylonian-like flight and veiled, Royal Arch journey to Jerusalem. The story of the reclamation of the people of Zeniff has all the makings, at least, of a reified Royal Arch journey on a mass scale. “But you have seen those afflicted sons of Zion visited, in the darkest night of their adversity, by a peaceful light from heaven,” Sargant’s monitor proclaims, “which guided them over rough and rugged roads to the scene of their former glory.” The Record of Zeniff can be seen, then, as a Babylonian-like incursion set in America, told from a Royal Arch point of view, promising God’s chosen people in the New World the same sense of national, cultural, and religious renewal extended to the ancient Israelites. “You have seen them enabled, by the signet of eternal

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truth,” the monitor goes on to explain, “to pass the veils that interposed between them and their fondest hopes.”35 The people of Zeniff bring back with them all their gold and silver and their precious things—an allusion to the holy vessels of the temple returned to the Jews at the behest of the Persian kings, Cyrus and Darius. Their reclamation sets the stage for the restoration of the power and authority of the priesthood on the American continent by a priest of the order of Melchizedek, whose shoe latchet neither Mosiah nor Nephi are worthy to loose. Several clues appear in the Zeniffite record, in particular its account of the life and death of Nephite prophet of woe Abinadi, cast into prison and put to death on a trumped-up charge of “revil[ing] the king.” The king’s name, Noah, may allude to the Noachian emblems of the Master Mason Degree—ark and anchor symbols of hope and rest in a “tempestuous sea of troubles.”36 The true Master Mason, as the certificate suggests, should be an island of virtue, towering above the waves of immorality that crash all around him. Abinadi’s insolence can also be seen as that of a Master Mason exercising his prerogative “to correct the errors and irregularities of . . . uninformed brethren, and to guard . . . against a breach of fidelity.” He means Noah’s office or his court no discourtesy. “To preserve the reputation of the fraternity unsullied,” the Charge to Master Masons at the initiation into the Third Degree continues, “must be your constant care. . . . Let no motive, therefore, make you swerve from your duty, violate your vows, or betray your trust; but be true and faithful, and imitate the example of that celebrated artist whom you this evening represent” (p. 72). Hiram Abiff is that celebrated artist whom Abinadi represents. Refusing to “recall all his words,”37 even at the behest of the king and in the face of certain death, Abinadi allows himself to be tortured to death as a final act of piety. His dying words, “O God, receive my soul,” allude to the Bible and to the grand sign and call of distress of the Master Mason, “O Lord! my God!”38 However, Abinadi’s skin is scourged with faggots, which is not how Hiram Abiff died. The manner of Abinadi’s death recalls that of the servants of God whom Nebuchadnezzar threw into a fiery furnace for insolence. They, however, are untouched, whereas poor Abinadi succumbs. And although he is a Christ figure of some kind, his death is not very Christ-like. In fact, a strong case can be made for Abinadi’s death as patterned after that of the Templar High Priest in Masonic lore, Grand Master Jacques de Molai, by the wicked king of France, Philip IV. The martyrdom of De Molai marks the dissolution of the so-called Order of the Temple, a period of spiritual darkness that forced the Templars underground. De Molai and his Knights Templar, ac-

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  The Great Eclipse and Terrible War About to be Made in His Name Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 5:106b.

cording to legend, were imprisoned, tortured, and then “burned to death upon fagots.”39 De Molai’s last words before the papal commission of Paris around 1309 underscore his unflinching belief in “but one God, one faith, one baptism, one Church, and when the soul is separated from the body . . . but one Judge of the good and evil” (p. 781). Abinadi also expounds the one, true Christian faith, the unity of the Father and Son, and, finally, death, resurrection, and judgment at the hands of that great Judge.40

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Webb’s Monitor contains an account of the Templars’ betrayal at the hands of wicked king Philip. Philip, it says, offered the papacy to the “greedy” archbishop of Bordeaux “on his engaging to perform six conditions,” the sixth revealed to him after making an oath.41 False charges brought against the Templars led to their disenfranchisement and a great many executions. Although the charge of treason (Abinadi’s crime, too) was subsequently shown to be baseless, “the Templars . . . thus declared innocent” (p. 184) were no more. The order never recovered. One wonders whether the story of Abinadi’s martyrdom is not also veiled commentary on Morgan’s kidnapping and murder by rogue Canandaigua Masons in 1826. Not unlike Abinadi, Morgan refused to recant all his words, paying the ultimate price. Does the Book of Mormon speculate that Masons cremated Morgan’s body in order to destroy the evidence? Is Alma’s secret assembly of saints, which follows on the heels of Abinadi’s murder, the pattern and rationale for Smith’s own Templar-style Masonic revitalization movement? One thing is clear. Abinadi’s martyrdom and Alma’s church in the wilderness look forward to the arrival of a full-fledged and decidedly Christian Masonry in America. At this point, all the reader can do, like Masonry itself, is wait.

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what manner of (masonic) men?

“Does not Joe Smith profess to be Jesus Christ?” No, but he professes to be His brother, as all other Saints have done and now do: Matt. xii:49,50, “And He stretched forth His hand toward His disciples and said, Behold my mother and my brethren; for whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.” —Joseph Smith Jr.

    of the quest for the long-lost book and all that search entails, the books of Alma and Helaman pick up where Mosiah leaves off. They contain much vital information of a social and cultural (even theological) kind but are not nearly as important as what precedes and what follows. In excess of two hundred pages, these two books do a masterful job of killing time (five hundred years or more) as we await the advent of something entirely different. In the meantime, Nephites and Lamanites duke it out. What began as a sibling rivalry engulfs an entire continent, escalating into a race war that pits white against dark in a battle to the death. There is much gratuitous swordplay, and the level of testosterone very high, indeed. The men of renown—all the Mosiahs, their sons, the Almas and their sons, even the Helamans (of which there are more than one) and theirs—are manly men: loving fathers and obedient sons, virtuous husbands, able statesmen, honorable soldiers for Christ on the field of battle, quick to forgive their enemies, ever mindful of the poor, the widow, etc., etc. The protracted battle for cultural supremacy between the Nephites and Lamanites in Alma and Helaman can be seen as a Templar-like battle to the death. But these books also prepare the ground in a near-literal sense for something truly glorious: the appearance of the resurrected Christ in the book of 3 Nephi. From a Masonic point of view, 3 Nephi is clearly the crux of the matter, a turning point in the narrative, when Mormonism veers far from Masonry without necessarily closing the gap with orthodox Christianity. On one level, the visit of

I

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Jesus to the Nephites following his death and resurrection can be seen as an orthodox affirmation of his divinity. Robert N. Hullinger contends that such testimony locates Smith opposite skepticism, that “the Book of Mormon was an apologetic for Jesus Christ,”1 but this may not be the intention at all; the Christocentrism of the Book of Mormon may rather be a means to an end. Rather than a defense of Jesus’ divinity, the Book of Mormon uses the appearance of the resurrected Christ to the Nephites to formulate an apology for Christian Masonry as the logical fulfillment of all that passes for Masonry up to this time— both in the narrative and in the history of the movement in the century leading up to Smith’s appearance. The hope of both text and author is to mend the rift that divides Ancients, or Royal Arch Masons, and their orthodox counterparts, dubbed Moderns but calling themselves Craft Masons. The plethora of French, German, and even Russian Royal Arch lodges that are partial to the Scottish Rite (remember that the titular head of the higher degrees, Chevalier Ramsay, was a Scot) need not concern us. All can be seen as variations on a Royal Arch/Knights Templar theme (allowing for a degree of poetic regional license), even the Rosicrucians, essentially the snobs of the movement, consisted largely of Royal Arch Past Masters who felt they were the only true Masons and the so-called Egyptian Rite—which included women and dabbled in the occult—also comes by way of the Royal Arch.2 But to see Mormonism as simply one of these variants of the Royal Arch will not do, for this ignores the more important fact that it hoped to graft all the branches to a single trunk—to the cross of the Mormon-Masonic Christ, to be precise. In order to do so, the overarching supremacy of the Christian or Chivalric Degrees because of their preoccupation with the Crusades and knighthood had to be established, making Mormonism both root and branch and thus the solution to the problem of (Masonic) sectarian fragmentation and strife. A dispensation from heaven gives it the necessary power to effect this radical change for the better—or so the Book of Mormon and its author would like us to believe. That most of what Jesus has to say comes straight out of the King James Version has always struck critics as extremely problematic from a purely sourcecritical standpoint. This is unimportant when compared to the literary function such glosses serve, shifting the focus from the Old Testament to the New. Suddenly, the Book of Mormon is decidedly Christian, more or less in keeping with the orthodox belief in the fulfilment of the Law by Christ. All of this can be interpreted as a fulfilment of orthodox Masonry (which considers itself a Jewish faith, taking for its inspiration the Old Testament and the patriarchs) and even of the Royal Arch, which is no less Judaic in tone, which are supplanted by the

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 a The Sign in Heaven of the Knights Templar Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 5:194b

Christian Degrees (the Knights Templar simply one of several Knightly designations listed). Given the Book of Mormon’s ambition to represent the stratosphere of the Masonic ritual system, it is perhaps appropriate that in it the resurrected Christ descends from the heavens, bringing the Saints, along with himself, down to earth, where he gives them his blessing. For the more orthodox Masonic reader, this is a hard pill to swallow. That the Book of Mormon might be said to credit the Christian Degrees as the fulfilment of prophecy constitutes a bold departure, indeed. As Mackey ex-

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 b Arnold Friberg, The Appearance of Jesus to the Nephites The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966)

plains, Christian Masonry threatened to do away with everything that preceded it. “The great discovery which was made in the Royal Arch,” he writes, “ceases to be of value in this degree; for it, another is substituted of more Christian application. . . . Everything, in short, about the degree is Christian.”3 Not unlike the Christian claim of fulfilling the Law of Moses rather than doing away with it, so, too, the argument for the supremacy of the Christian Degrees must be seen as the basis for a completely new patriarchal order of things.

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Smith’s journey from village seer to prophet of God can thus be seen as both a departure and a mere taking of Masonry to its logical conclusion, climbing the Masonic mystical ladder to its highest level, Mormonism being the most Christian of the Masonic Degrees yet. When the Nephite Christ says his good-byes, his last words are telling: “And my Father sent me that I might be lifted up upon the cross; and after that . . . I might draw all men unto me, even so should men be lifted up by the Father. . . . Therefore if ye do these things, blessed are ye, for ye shall be lifted up at the last day.”4 In light of allusions in the text and paraphrases of the Knights Templar initiation ritual, the elevation of Masonry to the status of a bona fide Christian fraternity is the objective. The appearance of the resurrected Christ is preceded by what might be termed a Masonic raising of the American continent herself. There are great tempests and earthquakes, buildings “falling to the earth” and cities “sink[ing] into the depths of the sea.” The earth falls under a blanket of thick darkness (pp. 470–472). There is a brief silence, and then “a small voice” is heard—as though the Father of Heaven is whispering to Mother Earth some Grand Omnific Word? It is light again. Jesus makes his New World debut, descending to earth “clothed in a white robe” (p. 476). Were this biblical allusion, he would be clothed in red not white—the garment of the biblical Christ dipped in blood.5 The Book of Mormon dresses him in the white robe of a Knight Templar, for he comes to make Knights Templar of his devoted followers. He motions to the people to “arise” and thrust their hands in his side and feel the prints of the nails in his feet. Those who do so are not doubting Thomases. All such doubt has been eradicated in the cataclysm that precedes his arrival. His appearance, after all, is a coronation and a knighting. In the Knights of Malta Degree (another of the Christian or Chivalric Degrees), three New Testament passages are read: Acts 28:1–6 (the story of Paul’s miraculous escape, first from being buried in the sea and then from falling down dead from a snakebite), John 19:19 (the title given Christ by Pilate, “Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews”), and last John 20:24–28 (the story of Thomas).6 The story of Jesus’ appearance to the Nephites begins with the no less miraculous escape of the Nephites from a raging sea and swelling landscape, followed by a no less titular but rather more flattering précis of Jesus’ true identity and finally a democratization of Thomas’s inspection of the stigmata. The last is called the “Sign of Unbelief,” the token of one’s reception into the order of the Knights of Malta. In the North American ritual, “the Sign of Unbelief is taken,” it says, “and is thus made: One brother says: ‘Reach hither thy finger and feel the prints of the nails.’ They join hands and force the f–-

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f–- into the centre of the palm. They say: ‘Reach hither thy finger and thrust it into my side.’ Each extends his l–- h–- and presses his fingers into the l–- s–of the other. With arms thus crossed, one says: ‘My Lord.’ The other replies: ‘And my God.’”7 Jesus celebrates the coming of the New Jerusalem, in particular.8 This is precisely what one would expect a Christian Knight to do. In the Scottish Rite, the supplicant dons the white robe of apocalyptic Masonry and ponders the mysteries of the New Jerusalem.9 The Jewish capital’s best-known defenders, the Knights Templar, are Masonry’s oldest and most vocal champions of the holy city’s return to glory. The Nephite Christ proves no exception. The risen Lord goes on to instruct the Nephites in the proper manner of baptism, discussing the issue of authority to baptize and criticizing infant immersion. A slight revision of his Sermon on the Mount appears, followed by an explication of the hidden meanings of the passages in John concerning the “lost sheep of Israel.” They are not Gentiles but the Lost Tribes. After blessing children, he breaks bread, blesses it, and gives it to the people in remembrance of his body. They take wine and drink, too, in remembrance of his blood. The next day he appoints twelve Nephite disciples, who demonstrate greater tenacity and thus faith than their Old World counterparts by not falling asleep when their Lord goes a little way off to pray to the Father. The Knights Templar “Exhortation” (seven ejaculations in all) might be said to be the pattern for Jesus’ appearance and ministry to the Nephites in the Book of Mormon: 1. Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted. 2. Come unto me, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 3. Christ suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow his steps. 4. For as we were as sheep going astray, but now are we returned to the shepherd and bishop of our souls.  , ,   merely paraphrase more of the Sermon on the Mount.10 The story of the Last Supper, Jesus’ disappointment in finding Peter and the two sons of Zebedee unable to watch him as he prays a little way off (Matthew 26:14–15, 36–39; 27:24–38), and the appointment of Matthias and thus a full complement of twelve apostles in the wake of Judas’s treachery and death (Acts 1:15–26) follow this (p. 190). The Knights of Malta Degree, in fact, very nearly accounts for Jesus’ every word and deed in the Book of Mormon, making the

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book a veiled mass Masonic raising of considerable importance in the grand Masonic and teleological scheme of things. Understanding the Book of Mormon as fictive Masonic ritual and apology for Christian Masonry vis-à-vis the appearance of Jesus Christ and his elevation of righteous Nephites and Lamanites to the same order of Christian Knighthood as himself, Mormonism thus forming a New World Masonic theocracy, changes rather significantly our understanding of the nature, origin, rise, and development of this religious community. Early Mormonism veered far from orthodox Masonry and orthodox Christianity in one fell swoop: too Christian to be Masonic, too Masonic to be Christian. (As an aside, although polygamy was a sore point for American Protestants, locating Mormonism on the cultural and social periphery of Evangelical, middle-class society, it also kept orthodox Masonry at bay.) That early Mormonism had a primitivist Masonic agenda has been forgotten over time, the religion keeping its ties to Masonry such a well-guarded secret that, given enough time, the faith would become vulnerable to any thoroughgoing Christian revisionism, having gone on to become a Christian denomination. The emphasis in the early years on the Bible and not the Book of Mormon, for example, has undoubtedly played a role in the steady Protestantization of modern Mormonism. Mormon missionaries are barely distinguishable from their Evangelical counterparts, dressing themselves and their beliefs in corporate garb, toting the same (by all appearances) zippered set of scriptures and testifying with equal zeal to the divinity of “Christ and him crucified.” For a time, Mormons appeared to be in the business of handing out free copies of the New Testament, the Book of Mormon relegated to a special order item. A host of superb scholarly minds could not agree more. Early Mormons were largely conservative, Bible-believing Christians: the Bible rather than the Book of Mormon informed them on matters of belief and practice. The Book of Mormon did not mold their thinking in significant ways until later in the history of the movement. The personal testimonies of many early converts have an orthodox, Fundamentalist ring.11 The new faith constituted a radical but essentially Protestant alternative to Evangelicalism—in the beginning, anyway, before polygamy and the political kingdom of God took it beyond the pale of Christianity.12 Periodical literature, sermons, and private journals seem to support this. Mormon historian Philip Barlow makes the strongest case for the centrality of the Bible in early Mormon life and thought. “Although [Joseph Smith] described the Book of Mormon as more correct than any other book,” he writes, “there is little evidence that he ever took the time to study its contents

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as he did the Bible’s.” The Book of Mormon “did not become the basis for early Church doctrine and practice,” he contends.13 In his 1977 doctoral dissertation, Gordon D. Pollock underscores Mormonism’s attempt to revitalize Christianity. Mormonism’s first critics and apostates criticized Smith for creating “a religion which veered far from Christianity.”14 That testimony has largely gone unchallenged. Jan Shipps has developed this idea most fully in her book, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. She explains that “the Latter-day Saints . . . embarked on a path that led to developments that now distinguish their tradition from the Christian tradition as surely as Christianity was distinguished from its Hebraic context.” Mormonism, like early Christianity, evolved into “a separate religious tradition and . . . must be understood and respected on its own terms.”15 Both Pollock and Shipps emphasize that Smith’s first religious musings were in line with those of orthodox Protestant theology. Later on, though, as his thinking “matured,” he gravitated to the arcane and heretical. An avalanche of scholarship since then seems only to support this. The publication of William E. McLellin’s papers, edited by Jan Shipps and John Welch, makes the same point: McLellin’s preoccupation with biblical proofs and images was an example of early Mormon Protestant sensibility. Welch likens McLellin’s journals to the letters of Paul in the New Testament, whereas Shipps offers the documents as proof of early Mormonism’s rootedness in Christianity.16 Pollock points out: “When all is said and done, however, we did not need McLellin’s journals to know this. The same information may be found in Reynold Cahoon’s 1831 journal. John S. Carter also makes these points in his journal that extends from 1831 to 1833.”17 Early Mormons, so named because of their belief in the Book of Mormon, did not much care for the book, one presumes. Evangelical scholars seem much more forgiving, locating early Mormonism on the lunatic fringe of antebellum Protestantism, a rural Revivalism to the left of Baptists and Methodists.18 Its extremely sardonic attacks against the Protestant mainstream, notwithstanding—the Edwardsean Evangelical establishment and its Finneyite counterpart, in particular19—enough latitude exists to include Mormonism as a full-fledged member of rural Protestantism’s loose coalition of dissenters and radical democrats. Antebellum America’s most notorious and obnoxious Evangelical backbenchers, early Mormons were Christians whether they wished to be viewed as such or not. That said, we dare not ignore the fact that Mormonism rejects any such connection to contemporary Christianity. The disproportionate number of biblical references in the early sources—in Smith’s recorded sermons, in particular—can

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be explained very easily without discarding the Book of Mormon or divorcing it from early Mormonism. That the first Mormon missionaries defended the new faith on solid biblical grounds is neither surprising nor paradoxical when one considers their audience: largely Bible-believing Christians and/or Evangelical critics. Orson Pratt, early Mormonism’s premier apologist for polygamy, took pride in his knowledge of the Bible, which merely allowed him to defeat his monogamist enemies using their scriptures.20 There is an equally important theological consideration, too. In Mormonism, the Bible (or stick of Judah) and Book of Mormon (or stick of Joseph) are “one.”21 Brigham Young taught: “There is no clash in the principles revealed in the Bible [and] the Book of Mormon. . . . The Book of Mormon declares that the Bible is true, and it proves it; and the two prove each other true.”22 The Book of Mormon claims to restore those plain and precious passages in the Bible that were either lost or removed by corrupt scribes. To argue that Mormons chose the Bible over the Book of Mormon ignores a fundamental hermeneutical and theological principle of Mormonism: the elucidation of biblical texts by means of additional revelation. Thus Mormons like William McLellin read their Bibles in earnest, to be sure, but through the lens of the Book of Mormon and other modern-day revelations.23 This clearly set them apart from the Protestant mainstream. They may have been Christians, but they did not consider themselves to be like other Christians, and we should perhaps take them at their word. The Masonic connection merely drives home that point. Despite the fact that Richard Bushman argues brilliantly for the primacy of the Book of Mormon,24 there may be some truth to the argument that it had a very brief shelf life. However, this may not have been because early Mormons preferred their Bibles over their Books of Mormon but rather because the temple loomed largest of all—and for good reason. A Masonic reading of the Book of Mormon suggests that it was meant as a fraternal Ark of the Covenant and thus temporary literary abode of Masonry (in the wake of the Morgan affair) until more permanent and spacious surroundings could be erected. The Bible had an important role to play in public displays of faith at home and abroad, but the Book of Mormon, enshrined in the temple ritual, was the Mormon Holy of Holies. There is little wonder that Mormons did not consult it. That their High Priests chose not to as well is the problem, for as the Bible replaced the Book of Mormon as the locus of faith, the temple—and religion, too—became a bastion of exclusivity rather than a monument to inclusion.

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III

the anti-evangelical mind of joseph smith Jr.

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  Arnold Friberg, Abinadi Delivers His Message To Wicked King Noah The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).

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nine

whether a man can enter a second time into his mother’s womb But the Reformed Baptists [Campbellites] held the doctrine . . . that a man must reform, that repentance was simply a reformation, and the moment that repentance was resolved upon, the candidate was ready for baptism; and so far their notion appeared to be an improvement upon the general idea entertained, and consonant with the Bible view of it, as it was laid down by the Savior and his Apostles. But here they stopped. —Joseph Smith Jr.

    was a time of radical social, political, economic, and religious upheaval and transformation. Widespread concern about the future well-being of the new republic in the new economic reality gave rise to yet another Great Awakening and Protestant reform strategy. Calvinist-Arminian debate heated up, with Arminians winning the day. A theology of works suited the unshakable belief of most Americans in the essential righteousness of the human thirst for greater self-determination—waters springing unto everlasting life.1 How this generation of postrevolutionary Americans should be reared—with loving kindness and even considerable reverence, given their unclouded recollections of the heavenly home—was of great importance to a nation of more and more believers in liberty and equality for all. It was high time that the Deity spare the rod. An upand-coming generation would not be so disciplined by earthly authority figures, either. The Calvinist standing order saw the error of its ways. Refusing to fight fire with more hellfire, it hoped to change utter defeat into a shallow victory by incorporating elements of the reigning Arminianism. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale and archenemy of Enlightenment rationalism in all forms, had a sudden change of heart on the vexatious matter of the final resting place of infants who die without baptism. He challenged “any objector to show, that they suffer more than they deserve.”2 After all, Calvin taught that some of the elect might be infants who die without baptism, going straight to Heaven anyway. Dwight

T

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picked his words carefully. But this would not keep the enemy at bay, and ultimately he gave up any right to call himself a Calvinist with such concessions as: “If we please to be saved, we shall now be saved. . . . There is nothing which prevents us from being saved, but our own inclination” (sermon 15 [1:253]). Following the Arminian example, he gave believers some of the credit. “No man is pardoned merely because of the Atonement made by Christ,” he would write, “but because of his own acceptance, also, of that atonement” (sermon 17 [2:412]). Though sin came into the world through Adam, in Dwight’s view, it no longer posed any serious threat (sermon 32 [2:5]). His student and sometime secretary Nathaniel W. Taylor also credited the reprobate with nourishing the seed of grace, which “moves upon, softens, and wins a rebel heart to the love of God—an influence under which the sinner, in the free exercise of his own adequate powers, loves, believes, and obeys God his Savior.”3 Meanwhile, Arminians went about their business blissfully unaware that the other side had capitulated. The assault against Calvinism, more often than not, amounted to shadowboxing. A reviewer wrote in a 1822 periodical: “We are often compelled to complain, that the opponents of Calvinism, never fairly attack its doctrines. . . . We are sometimes disposed to wonder,—if this system of doctrines be really so absurd, and dangerous, and ‘blasphemous’ too, . . . why it cannot be shown to be so, without resorting to misrepresentation,— and why those who undertake to expose its enormities, are not content sometimes to hold it up, just as it is actually professed and believed.”4 Indeed! Unitarians were the worst offenders, tarring Calvinists, Old and New Divinity Men alike, with the same brush, accusing one and all of unspeakable soteriological and eschatological evils against poor, defenseless children of all peoples. William Ellery Channing’s 1819 Baltimore sermon epitomizes this lack of attention to detail: it excoriated Calvinism in particular and orthodox Protestantism in general. Channing objected to a system that, in his view, “render[ed] certain and infallible the total depravity of every human being from the first moment of his moral agency,” asserting the election of some and the eternal damnation of the rest, including infants.5 The Mormon prophet was no better informed or scrupulous. Caught in the middle, another Calvinist turned Arminian, New England Revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, was first to capitalize on the confusion. Born in Warren, Connecticut, on August, 29, 1792, he taught school before moving on to practice law under Benjamin Wright of Adams, New York. His study of the Hebraic foundations of the law led him to inquire concerning his immortal soul, and in 1821 the Deity claimed him. Finney straightaway left his

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fledgling law practice to preach the gospel, obtaining a license from the local Presbyterian church. Finney’s methods proved objectionable to liberal and conservative, Arminian and Calvinist alike. New School theologians Lyman Beecher and Asahel Nettleton attacked Finney for being undignified, sacrificing clerical decorum simply to win more souls to Christ than the next guy.6 Old School Calvinists did not take kindly to his democratization of Calvinism, fretting that it would undoubtedly undermine social order.7 Finney gave Americans precisely what they seemed to want—more say in spiritual matters than ever before—and his methods were well suited to an increasingly mobile, urbane society.8 William G. McLoughlin explains: Finney was a child of his age, not an enemy of it. He had little use for Calvinism, and the basic philosophical and social principles underlying his thought were essentially the same as those associated with Jacksonian democracy. Like the Jacksonians, Finney had an ardent faith in progress, in the benevolence of God, and in the dignity and worth of the common man. Like the Jacksonians, he believed that the restrictive clerical and aristocratic traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were out of date. . . . Finney was no backward-looking fundamentalist exhorter, longing for the good old days of Puritanism. . . . He was in fact just the opposite of a theocrat—he was a pietist. And that is why he spent his life at odds with the Calvinists of his day. . . . His mission, as he saw it, was to create a universal Church based upon the fundamentals of the gospel. (pp. viii–ix)

Finney denounced his erstwhile Presbyterianism and, in his seminal Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), repudiated the Westminster Confession of Faith as an impediment to the dissemination of Christianity (p. ix). His real strength, however, lay not in theology but in the psychology and sociology of religious belief: he was the author of a market-driven and market-driving reinvention of American Christianity. Unlike Jonathan Edwards, who described his famous Northampton revival as “a marvelous work of God” (p. x), Finney boasted that his was “not a miracle or dependent on a miracle” but the “philosophical result of the right use of constitutional means” (p. xi). His social prayer meetings sometimes lasted the entire night when conversions were not forthcoming. When he preached, would-be converts sat front and center on what came to be called the “anxious bench,” where he could bellow at them nonstop. “Sinners,” Finney

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writes, “ought to be made to feel that they have something to do, and that is repent. . . . Religion is something to do, not something to wait for” (pp. 379– 380; see also pp. 203–214, 227). Things did not always go as planned, not even for the indomitable Finney. Conversion no longer depended on an angry God but, according to some, a fickle one. Not all who wanted to be saved got saved—and not for lack of trying. Finney could do no better than admonish sinners to pray “without ceasing.”9 Yet such tenacity might not produce the desired end. The Mormon prophet may have been one such spectacular Finneyite failure, claiming to want to get religion but unable to feel anything (this was the tenor of the opening verses of his official account of the First Vision).10 In 1835, the same year Finney published his Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Alexander Campbell published The Christian System, which proffered an alternative scheme someone like Smith might have found more to his liking. Campbell, a native of Ireland, was born in 1788, the scion of Christian primitivists. His father, Thomas, advocated the restoration of primitive Christianity as the only way to end sectarian rivalry. Once in America (Bethany, West Virginia) young Alexander joined the Baptist Convention, but his ideas proved too controversial. In 1830, the year Smith established the Church of Christ, Campbell broke with the Baptist mainstream and organized a church of his own, the Disciples of Christ, which had an impressive tally of converts its first quarter. The founder of Bethany College, Campbell served as its president until his death in 1866.11 Unlike Finney, the consummate marketing strategist and modernist, Campbell comes off as a backward-looking fundamentalist and eighteenth-century natural philosopher—something of a Puritan, in short. His “system,” however, served many who fell through the Finneyite cracks. In The Christian System, Campbell defines faith as the effect of belief, good works, and a progressive series of choices that believers make (p. 8). Faith in Christ, he argues, is “the effect of belief. Belief is the cause; and trust, confidence, or faith in Christ, the effect”; repentance is also an “effect of faith” (p. 52). Campbell defines repentance as “sorrow for sins committed . . . resolution to forsake them . . . ceasing to do evil . . . [and] restoring what [one] has unjustly taken away” (pp. 53–54). Adult immersion baptism is the effect of faith and repentance. “Without previous faith in the blood of Christ,” Campbell explains, “and deep and unfeigned repentance before God, neither immersion in water, nor any other action can secure us the blessings of peace and pardon. . . . To such only as are truly penitent, dare we say, ‘Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling upon the name of the Lord. . . .

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You are washed, you are justified, you are sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of God’ ” (p. 58). “Entire change,” he goes on to explain, “consists in four things: a change of views; a change of affections; and change of state; and a change of life” (p. 60). Faith and repentance are consistent with the first two; baptism and the Holy Spirit with the last two; and baptism pertains to the remission of sins (justification), whereas the gift of the Holy Spirit facilitates the perfection of the individual (sanctification). For Campbell, the Evangelical-Finneyite notion that the Holy Spirit saved sinners in their sins was not only morally repugnant but logically incoherent. “The Spirit is not promised to any persons out of Christ,” he writes, “only to them that believe in and obey him. These he actually and powerfully assists in the mighty struggle for eternal life” (pp. 64–65). Campbell rejected the orthodox Calvinist understanding of original sin that stresses defective will, not mortality, as the effect of the Fall. “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by that one sin,” he writes, “and so death, the wages of sin, has fallen upon all the offspring of Adam” (p. 27). In common with the New Divinity men—Taylor, in particular12—Campbell rejected the orthodox doctrine that the “sin of Adam was the personal offense of all his children.” His ideas also verged on Universalism. The “second Adam” (Jesus Christ), Campbell argues in The Christian System, released all humanity from the grips of physical death. Only those who “actually and voluntarily sin against a dispensation of mercy under which they are placed” suffer spiritual death, whereas both wicked and righteous will come forth in the resurrection.13 Finney, in his Lectures on Systematic Theology, asks the question, no doubt directed at the Campbellite heresy, “What kind of death is intended, where death is denounced against the transgressor, as the penalty of the law of God?” It is not merely natural death, for—(1) This would, in reality, be no penalty at all. But it would be offering a reward to sin. If natural death is all that is intended, and if persons, as soon as they are naturally dead, have suffered the penalty of the law, and their souls go immediately to heaven, the case stands thus: if your obedience is perfect and perpetual, you shall live in this world forever; but if you sin, you shall die and go immediately to heaven. “This would be hire and salary,” and not punishment. . . . (3) If natural death be the penalty of God’s law, there is no such thing as forgiveness, but all must actually endure the penalty. (4) If natural death be the penalty, then infants and animals suffer this penalty, as well as the most abandoned transgressors. (5) If natural death be the penalty, and the only penalty, it sustains no proportion whatever to the guilt of sin.14

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The penalty of God’s law is not spiritual death, he argues: “(1) Because spiritual death is a state of entire sinfulness. (2) To make a state of entire sinfulness the penalty of the law of God, would be to make the penalty and the breach of the precept identical. (3) It would be making God the author of sin, and would represent him as compelling the sinner to commit one sin as the punishment for another,—as forcing him into a state of total and perpetual rebellion, as the reward of his first transgression” (p. 210). Finney’s real complaint, however, seems to be that Campbell’s “system” rejects the doctrine of original sin from which a cauldron of heresy bubbles. The Book of Mormon discussion of the fall, original sin, depravity, election, and the new birth is similar to Campbell’s in many respects. Nephi explains: The Lord God gave unto man, that he should act for himself. . . . They are free to choose liberty and eternal life . . . or choose captivity or death, . . . Adam fell, that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy. And the Messiah cometh in the fullness of time, that he might redeem the children of men from the fall. And because that they are redeemed from the fall, they have become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves, and not to be acted upon save it be by the punishment of the law, and the great and last day, according to the commandments which God hath given.15

This collapses into Universalism, too: For as death hath passed upon all men there must needs to fulfil the merciful plan of the great Creator, there must needs be a power of resurrection, and the resurrection must needs come unto all man by reason of the fall. . . . Wherefore, it must needs be an infinite atonement. . . . Wherefore, the first judgment which came upon man must needs have remained to an endless duration. And if so this flesh must have laid down to rot and to crumble to its mother earth, to rise no more. . . . O how great the goodness of our God, who prepareth a way for our escape from the grasp of this awful monster; yea, that monster, death and hell, which I call the death of the body, and also the death of the spirit . . . and the bodies and the spirits of men will be restored one to the other; and it is by the power of the resurrection of the Holy One of Israel . . . and all men become incorruptible, and immortal. (pp. 78–83)

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The Book of Mormon outlines a four-square gospel predicated upon faith, repentance, and baptism followed by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Belief is a good work and precedes faith, which precedes repentance, and so forth. Nephi explains: Wherefore, my beloved brethren, can we follow Jesus, save we shall be willing to keep the commandments of the Father? And the Father saith, Repent ye, repent ye, and be baptized in the name of my beloved Son. And also, the voice of the Son came unto me, saying, He that is baptized in my name, to him will the father give the Holy Ghost. . . . Wherefore, my beloved brethren, I know that if ye shall follow the Son, with full purpose of heart [believe], with full purpose of heart, acting no hypocrisy and no deception before God, but with real intent [faith], repenting of your sins, witnessing unto the Father that ye are willing to take upon you the name of Christ, by baptism; yea, by following your Lord and Savior down into the water, according to his word; behold, then shall ye receive the Holy Ghost; ye then cometh the baptism of fire and the Holy Ghost; and then can ye speak with the tongue of Angels, and shout praises unto the Holy One of Israel. (pp. 118–119)

The baptism of Alma and Helam, a mutual baptism, illustrates this: And now it came to pass that Alma took Helam, he being one of the first, and went and stood forth in the water, and cried, saying, O Lord, pour out thy Spirit upon thy servant, that he may do this work with holiness of heart. . . . And he said: Helam, I baptize thee, having authority from the Almighty God . . . and may the Spirit of the Lord be poured out upon you; and may he grant you eternal life, through the redemption of Christ. . . . And after Alma had said these words, both Alma and Helam were buried in the water; and they arose and came forth out of the water rejoicing, being filled with the spirit . . . yea, and they were baptized . . . and were filled with the grace of God. (p. 192)

These and other parallels clearly had some part to play in the conversion of a group of radical Campbellites, led by the breakaway Campbellite minister Sidney Rigdon.16 A genetic relationship is unlikely. After all, other American Protestants with whom neither Smith nor Campbell had any contact before 1830 propound the same four steps as a ladder of sorts to salvation. Brethren (or Dunkers), some of whom also converted to Mormonism, taught that the Holy

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Spirit came only to those who had faith and repented of their sins. In 1830 Peter Nead of the Brethren, declared: “The terms of the Gospel in order of salvation, are Repentance, Faith and Baptism, and the promise is, the remission of sins, and the reception of the Holy Spirit. . . . Now these prerequisites [to salvation] are connected,—and what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”17 Not unlike Campbellite and Dunker teaching, the Book of Mormon equates conversion, or the new birth, with baptism. Repentance precedes baptism, and the Holy Spirit follows. Baptism, however, is a witness to one’s Heavenly Father of a willingness to obey the commandments. Faith, repentance, and baptism, the same good work, thus constitute an even faster track to the Holy Spirit than Campbell’s. Other passages in the Book of Mormon, however, seem to endorse the Finneyite model of Evangelical spiritual new birth, a prebaptismal-encounterof-the-Holy-Spirit scenario. The conversions of Nephi, Enos, Alma the Younger, and King Lamoni are cases in point.18 “Whosoever should believe that Christ should come,” King Benjamin says, “the same might receive remission of their sins” (an allusion to Peter’s sermon on baptism in Acts 2, perhaps). No mention of baptism here. Those to whom King Benjamin preaches receive “a remission of their sins . . . having peace of conscience, because of the exceeding faith which they had in Jesus Christ.”19 (This is not the consensus of orthodox Protestantism. The Spirit only convicts, having no cleansing power.) Nephi, Enos, King Benjamin, King Lamoni, and Alma all live before the birth and death of Jesus—before the atonement of Christ—in other words, before baptism is efficacious. The Book of Mormon does not wish to rule out prevenient grace, perhaps, but gives it a certain sanctifying power. Moroni adjures readers at the end of the book “to ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ” if the Book of Mormon is true and he will “manifest the truth of it by the power of the Holy Ghost” (p. 586). Moroni continues: “And again, if ye, by the grace of God are perfect in Christ and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father, unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy without spot” (pp. 587–588). In fact, the pre-Christian baptismal rites in the Book of Mormon may be an attempt to insulate the text against the Calvinist rejoinder that belief in the necessity of immersion baptism condemns more than its saves, onerous to ailing infants, in particular. Calvin praised baptism for its didactic value—symbolic of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus—but argued that “it is not necessary, as that a person, who is deprived of the opportunity of embracing it, must immedi-

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ately be considered lost.”20 The new birth as the baptism by fire and the Holy Ghost avoids the problem of not only infants who die without baptism but heathen and pre-Christian Israelites as well. Calvinists and Evangelicals accuse those who insist on an overly literal interpretation and rigid enforcement of the New Testament decree in St. Mark (“He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be damned” [Mark 16:16]) of making God the author of sin. And so the Book of Mormon takes care not to fall into the same trap as Baptists and Catholics, folding Campbell and Finney into a seamless whole. Another equally compelling interpretation exists that does not rule out the above: the conversion of Nephi and company is consistent with the mystical predilections of frontier Universalists such as Dr. George De Benneville. De Benneville’s experience is almost identical to Lehi’s and Nephi’s, in particular. “My fever increased in such a manner as reduced me almost to a skeleton,” De Benneville writes in his memoir: While I lay in this weak situation, I was favored through grace with many visions. In one it appeared to me that I was conducted into a fine plain filled with all kinds of fruit trees agreeable both to the sight and smell, loaded with all kinds of the most delicious fruits which came to my mouth and satisfied me as with a river of pleasure. [At the] same time I beheld the inhabitants. They were beautiful beyond expression, clothed in garments as white as snow. . . . The weakness of my body so increased that I was certain of dying. . . . I felt myself die and . . . I was separated from my body. . . . I was drawn up as in a cloud and behold great wonders where I passed, impossible to be written down.21

Ernest Cassara argues in his book Universalism in America that Universalists were “come-outers” from the lower classes of New England society, subscribing to a pious biblical orientation (pp. 1–44). In De Benneville’s case, however, his epiphany can be seen as Masonic analogue, a thinly veiled Journey of the Freemason in the World. In fact, many of the aforementioned theological parallels can be explained without citing a single antebellum Evangelical authority. The Campbellite and/or Dunkers system may not be relevant. What is easily mistaken as a fairminded policy of equal time for the opposing Finneyite side may well be a misreading of veiled Master Mason and Royal Arch raisings for the Evangelical new birth. Nephi’s ostensibly Campbellite sermonizing and Finneyite conversion is less a contradiction than the product of a failure on the part of his modern readers to detect a Masonic pattern in all this.

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The Book of Mormon’s rejection of original sin, in fact, can be seen as having nothing whatsoever to do with the New England Theology, Taylorism, or the Campbellites and Dunkers, instead being more Masonic mimesis. The second lecture of the Royal Arch Degree, for example, discusses the thorny question of original sin, defending, as the Book of Mormon does, the innate goodness of human nature despite the stain of sin, lauding the virtues of the very considerable “powers of reasoning, and capacity of improvement and of pleasure” despite the need for “grace [to] guide and assist us in rebuilding a second Temple.”22 Carnes points out that “with this the Royal Arch boldly ventured upon some of the most troublesome currents of Protestant theology: Adam’s fall, it suggested, was not so tragic, nor his moral burden too onerous, for, through reason, man could enjoy life and elevate himself to grace. . . . By suggesting that redemption could be accomplished through human reason, the Royal Arch contravened the most fundamental tenet of Christianity.”23 The Royal Arch Degree, in addition to praising reason, underscores the necessity of humility and greater deference to the Deity in one’s daily life, evidenced by a longing for more grace in the rapidly changing and impersonal world outside the lodge. This is the Book of Mormon’s position almost to the letter. All the talk in the Book of Mormon concerning the “new birth” can also be seen as Masonic. Arthur E. Waite explains: “There is one form of Sacramentalism which characterizes the highest Orders of Initiation” and “is easy to miss.”24 All “true initiation” is designed to communicate “by the mediation of symbols, a new life, the pageant of an inward generation. It proclaims, in other words, to every Candidate, that ‘except a man be born again’ he shall not enter—that is, essentially and truly—into the Secret Kingdom of the Rites” (2:331–332). One would assume such a statement to come from a Protestant writer, not a Masonic one. The sacramental life of the Knight Templar, moreover, consists of faith, repentance, baptism, and the “gift” of the Holy Ghost, as well as a memorial Eucharist.25 The redemption of Christ becomes the “Grand Omnific (Last) Word” for all such Christian Masons. We require neither Finney nor Campbell to account for the Book of Mormon’s unique take on the new birth. Its discussion of death, resurrection, and eternal life in the world to come could easily have nothing to do with Christianity and what Waite calls its “crude dramatic presentation of natural decease, followed by physical resurrection, as this is expected to take place at the last day and for the purposes of a general judgment.”26 Instead of being driven by some morbid Protestant fascination with what comes next, the whole of it

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can be seen as a discussion of the “mystical life” of the Royal Arch Master Mason and Templar Knight. The constant companionship of the Holy Ghost in the Book of Mormon seems patterned after the Masonic belief in the regeneration of the Christian Mason by the Holy Spirit. “The Divine Spirit of a man is not one with his soul until after regeneration,” Waite explains, “which is the beginning of that intimate union which constitutes what is called mystically the marriage of the Hierophant. . . . When regeneration is fully attained, the Divine Spirit alone instructs the Hierophant” (2:334). Smith may well have baptized ancient Israelites out of ignorance of the niceties of Christian theology, as Campbell thought. But the pre-Christian baptisms in the Book of Mormon could as easily be so-called Masonic Baptisms. From the point of view of orthodox Christian theology, baptism makes no sense, having no force until after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The sacramental curtain for Christianity lifts when Jesus ascends to heaven and not before. Masonry, however, pushes this as far back as the first temple and, in some American and antebellum New York Royal Arch sources, to Adam: insofar as baptism is a generic symbol of death, resurrection, and regeneration, the ritual becomes a celebration of the sacrifice of the Grand Master builder of Solomon’s temple, Hiram Abiff, consummated on the cross. Interestingly, the ritual of Masonic Baptism goes back to the late eighteenth century, coming to America via the more radical French or mystical branch of esoteric Masonry. The Rite of Masonic Baptism, also known as the Reception of a Louveteau, takes issue with the customary practice in the Roman Catholic faith of infant baptism, baptizing “male children only, and not until they had attained a minimum age of twelve years” (2:38). However, one finds a clear statement in Oliver’s Book of the Lodge in favor of adult baptism as the first of many ritualized events in the life of the catechumen. “He enters into Covenant at the Font,” Oliver writes, “receives the O[rdinance] of B[aptism] and becomes entitled to the white robe . . . in imitation probably of the Levites.” Oliver goes on to explain that the aspirant is charged with the responsibility to “receive the white and immaculate garment, which thou mayest bring forth without spot before the tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ, that thou mayest have eternal life.”27 Baptism in Masonry has a juvenile application, too, but only for the (male) children of Master Masons, for whom it is designed to secure protection and membership. What is known as the Ritual of Adoption for Children, another type of Masonic Baptism involves the laying of hands on the heads of initiates and the receipt of heavenly and earthy “gifts.”28

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  Symbolic Plate of Adoptive Masonry. Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 5:438.

Although the Book of Mormon also rejects infant baptism, seeming to mimic the Masonic understanding of juvenile baptism followed by the laying on of hands as the order of confirmation and manner of gaining access to the spiritual gifts, there are important differences. First of all, both boys and girls are baptized and confirmed. The Book of Mormon is not specific about age, though Smith did inquire of the Deity regarding the exact moment of “accountability,” that being eight years of age, all things being equal.29 In fact, at baptism all things are altogether equal when it comes to male and female children.

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At the age of twelve, this changes, of course, for only males are ordained. Although this is a sore point for some women in the church, it should be seen not as unequal treatment but more as a division of church labor. Boys attend an exclusively male meeting known simply as Priesthood Meeting, whereas girls will eventually join their mothers in the governance of a female (priesthood) auxiliary (not to be underestimated) known as the Relief Society. Suffice it to say that the early Mormon understanding of priesthood power can be seen as a factor of temple attendance rather than church governance, more or less in keeping with the division of powers in the Scottish Rite or what Pike calls “the three great disciplines of War, the Monarchy and the Priesthood” and “all that the CAMP, the PALACE, and the TEMPLE may symbolize.”30 If this is so, neither priesthood nor Relief Society is an actual priesthood but rather a type of bipartisan court. Smith’s famous Council of Fifty might be said to complete the Scottish triumvirate, as CAMP and thus a political/military adjunct, as Hansen theorizes.31 The Book of Mormon’s chief complaint concerns the practice of infant baptism and the orthodox Catholic and Baptist doctrine that little children who die without baptism must spend eternity in (Catholic) limbo or (Baptist) hell. In fact, this concern for children of both sexes extends to children of all races. One and all are said to be joint heirs with Christ by virtue of their years (or lack thereof). The mystical journey of the Christian Knight seems in most ways indistinguishable from the born-again experience of the Evangelical Christian. But the essential difference—a matter of gender not theology—is the basis for a powerful rift. Male and female spirituality—Masonic and Evangelical—employ the same language to describe two fundamentally different mystical experiences. The real genius of the Book of Mormon may be how perfectly the two come together, the object of the text to establish common theological ground where men and women, boys and girls, and even believers and any heathen who might be so inclined can worship God and neighbor in spirit and in truth.

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heaven and hell: divining the ghost of emmanuel swedenborg What is the damnation of hell? To go with that society who have not obeyed His commands. . . . The great misery of departed spirits in the world of spirits where they go after death, is to know that they come short of the glory that others enjoy and that they might have enjoyed themselves, and they are their own accusers. “But.” says one, “I believe in one universal heaven and hell, where all go, and are all alike, and equally miserable or equally happy.” What! . . . There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter. . . . All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they have been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God. . . . For I the Lord will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts. —Joseph Smith Jr. And the common idea of a soul is that it is something like ether, or air, thus that it is breath such as a man gives forth when he dies, in which, however, his vitality resides. It is thought that the soul is devoid of sight like that of the eye, of hearing like that of the ear, and of speech such as that of the mouth; when yet a man after death is none the less a man, and so fully is he a man, that he does not know but that he is still living in the former world. . . . There is this difference between a man in the natural world and a man in the spiritual world, that the latter is clothed with a substantial body, but the former with a material body, within which is his substantial body; and a substantial man sees a substantial man as clearly and distinctly as a material man sees a material man. . . . In a word, there are in the spiritual world all the things that exist in the natural world; but the things in heaven are immeasurably more perfect. . . . It must be kept in mind, that in the spiritual world the state of every nation and people in general, as well as of individuals, is according to their acknowledgment and worship of God, and that all who in heart acknowledge God, and, henceforth, all who acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ as God, the Redeemer and Savior, are in heaven, while those who do not acknowledge Him are beneath heaven and are there instructed; that those who receive him are taken up into heaven, but those who do not are cast down into hell. —Emmanuel Swedenborg.

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    is almost Dantean, its discussion of hell ostensibly the stuff of Jonathan Edwards. The souls of men seem to hang in the balance. A third of the book has something to say about hell in particular. What it means, exactly, and whether the orthodox Protestant understanding is praised or criticized, is the question. Nothing in Masonry is more akin to Protestant eschatology than the lessons it draws from the brutal slaying of Hiram Abiff, the inevitability of death, and the final judgment to follow. Masons obsessed about death, locking themselves in dark rooms and sometimes even in coffins where they could contemplate the state of their immortal souls in earnest. The Book of Mormon does a good job of re-creating that same sense of foreboding within its pages. It is dark; the light it offers that much more exquisite. Nephi and others in the book bemoan the terrors of hell as integral to their ritual passage from boyhood to manhood. What we do not in all probability have here, then, is a thick stew of orthodox Protestant eschatology: the Book of Mormon discussion of the intermediate state and afterlife, of the propriety of infant baptism, and the future state of heathens are not a paper trail leading back to some New England seminary but more Masonic recitative that seeks to establish a common footing with its nemesis, Evangelical Protestantism.1 The prevailing school of thought, attributable in part to Mormon scholar Grant Underwood, has long maintained that a healthy fear of hell resided in the hearts of the early Mormon faithful. The same year Smith published the Book of Mormon (1830) he dictated another revelation that defined eternal punishment as qualitative rather than quantitative, “God’s punishment” rather than endless punishment. One heaven became three glories instead, with hell the abode of the devil and his angels. Where mortals feared to tread, devils rushed in.2 This was good news, one would think. Yet, the Saints stubbornly chose the fire and brimstone of orthodox Christianity over modern revelation of a cheerier kind, the Book of Mormon confirming them in their erstwhile Protestantism, according to some.3 That said, a good number who joined the Mormon church in the early years were heretics, many of them Universalists. Most of Smith’s family were not mere Bible-believing Christians but recalcitrants who put much stock in their reading of the sacred texts, arriving at conclusions on a wide array of theological issues that took them well outside the pale of mainstream Christianity. Some who joined had been looking for something that promised to douse the fire, not fan the flames. Sarah Studevant Leavitt, for example, had a vision of hell before becoming a Mormon. “I was seriously impressed and desired very

T

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much to be saved from that awful hell I had heard so much about,” she writes, the new faith disabusing her of any fear of dying.4 Milo Andrus had been “much exercised about a future State” before his conversion, finding Mormonism a welcome relief to the morbidity of orthodox Protestants.5 Oren Jefferds, a native of Rochester, New York, was restored to health “by the authority of the Eternal Priesthood”6 and later joined as a show of gratitude for the church’s role in ameliorating the psychological torment brought on by Evangelical preaching. Other such testimonies are not hard to find in the stacks of the LDS Church Archives, James Allen Browning’s being another whose conversion to Mormonism made him no longer fearful of eternal damnation.7 Evangelical preachers released as many heavy hearts as they ensnared, too. The difference was that Mormon converts who came in with heretical Universalist-like beliefs were not disabused of anti-Evangelical prejudice. Benjamin Brown is a case in point. A Universalist before converting to Mormonism, he writes in his journal: “In common with the rest of the ‘Universalists,’ I felt unfavourable to these [revivalist] meetings.” For Brown, “the horrible hell and damnation theories of most of the other parties . . . [were] inconsistent with the mercies and love of God.”8 Mormonism only confirmed Brown in his erstwhile Universalism. Thomas Steed, another dyed-in-the-wool Universalist, converted to Mormonism because it seemed to share his contempt for a wide range of orthodox Protestant doctrines, that of eternal damnation in particular.9 Brown and Steed hardly seem candidates for inclusion among the alleged Bible-reading Protestant Mormon majority. Supposedly, the Book of Mormon offered little in the way of psychological comfort or eschatological support. What did early Mormons like Brown and Steed read, then? What attracted them to Mormonism in the first place? Let us be clear, for starters, about where the Book of Mormon stands on the matter. In Protestant eschatology, there are two opposing, albeit accepted, interpretations of the intermediate state: (1) at death, the soul sleeps until the resurrection, when it will be judged and assigned to either heaven or hell; (2) at death, the soul is immediately consigned to heaven, hell, or purgatory, where it anxiously awaits the resurrection. In either case, the apportionments are final. To what degree the Book of Mormon agrees with one or the other should resolve the question. Jacob is the first to expound the intermediate state: the souls in paradise and prison, the restoration of all things (the universal resurrection), and the final judgment. He begins: “For I know that thou hast searched much, many of you, to know of things to come.”10 He explains that death is a necessary part of the

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divine plan. “The Great Creator . . . suffereth himself to become subject unto man, in the flesh, and die for all men, that all men might become subject unto him.” Without the atonement, human souls would remain forever separated from their bodies and subject to the devil. “O the wisdom of God! His mercy and grace! For behold, if the flesh should rise no more, our spirits must become subject to that Angel which fell from before the presence of the Eternal God, and became the Devil, to rise no more. And our spirits must have become like unto him, and we become Devils, Angels to a Devil, to be shut out from the presence of our God, and to remain with the father of lies, in misery, like unto himself” (p. 79). Jacob explains that “everlasting fire” and “endless torment” are reserved for the devil and his angels exclusively. Already, Brown and Steed have something to smile about, for this is not the orthodox Christian understanding by any stretch of the imagination. “They which are righteous, shall be righteous still, and they which are filthy, shall be filthy still” does sound suspiciously like the orthodox view until Jacob explains that “they which are filthy, are the Devil and his angels” (p. 80). Jacob also claims that Jesus suffered the “pains of every living creature, both men, women and children, which belong to the family of Adam” (pp. 80–81). Devils are excluded. So far so good. The righteous, however, are said to have a perfect knowledge of their righteousness, the wicked a bright recollection of their guilt. Punishment is equated with the knowledge of one’s sins in the presence of God. “And, in fine, wo unto all they that die in their sins,” Jacob explains, “for they shall return to God, and behold his face, and remain in their sins. . . . Remember, to be carnally minded, is death, and to be spiritually minded, is life eternal” (p. 82). Jacob does not fail to address the issue of baptism. “And he commandeth all men that they must repent, and be baptized in his name, having perfect faith in the Holy One of Israel, or they cannot be saved in the Kingdom of God.” This all sounds very final, very orthodox. However, there are far too many exceptions: little children and heathen, for example. “But wo unto him that hath the law given . . . and transgresseth [it], and that wasteth the days of his probation: for awful is his state” (p. 81). And so it seems we are back on track yet again. At least all those who willfully deny the tender mercies of God are bound for what seems to be the everlasting and unquenchable fires of hell. Alma, in a sermon on “the restoration of [all] things” (p. 335)—ostensibly advice to a wayward son—explains that the spirits of all men are resurrected, a glorious reunification of body and soul—which, incidentally, is cause for celebration. The bodily resurrection operates according to the principle of like for

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like rather than as a judgment. This is a good bit of Christian theologizing, but then he goes off track. Some, he claims, will be “raised to happiness, according to [their] desires of happiness,” others “according to [their] desires of evil” (p. 336). The righteous and wicked are their own judges. At this point, Alma has sabotaged any chance the Book of Mormon had of not coming off as decidedly of the Universalist school. “Behold, it has been made known unto me, by an angel, that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body,” he explains, “are taken home to that God who gave them life.” First, “the righteous are received into a state of happiness which is called paradise.” The wicked, meanwhile, are “cast out into outer darkness.” But outer darkness is not a separate place. It is a state of mind that has “no part or portion with the spirit of the Lord” (p. 334). Heaven and hell are thus one place where vastly different mental states coexist. The implications are extremely problematic vis-à-vis the orthodox Christian understanding of divine justice and mercy. Yet Alma is aware of the problem and supplies the following rejoinder. “God himself atoneth for the sins of world,” he reasons, “to appease the demands of justice, that God might be a perfect, just God, and a merciful God” (pp. 338–339). The universal atonement precludes the need for God himself to be anyone’s judge and jury, least of all executioner. “Whosoever will come, may come,” Alma says, “whosoever will not come, the same is not compelled to come” (p. 339). Their punishment is the anxiety associated with disembodied existence for the entirety of the millennium when the righteous rule the earth with Jesus as resurrected beings. This is still not quite eternal damnation—and not quite orthodox Protestant doctrine, either. Smith’s subsequent revelations concerning three degrees of glory—the telestial, terrestrial, and celestial—are thought to represent a more liberal formulation when, in truth, they can be seen as a more sober and indeed static vision— unorthodox but not nearly as radical or dynamic as that in the Book of Mormon.11 Smith may have regretted this first amendment to Mormon eschatology, unwittingly sending his older brother Alvin—who died unbaptized a few years before the publication of the Book of Mormon and restoration of the gospel—to a lesser celestial globe for eternity. An 1836 revelation of the celestial kingdom would correct this, bringing things back in line with the Book of Mormon: “Also all that shall die . . . without a knowledge of it [the gospel and baptism for the remission of sins], who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God.”12 While the Book of Mormon has a lot to say about hell, it is not the stuff of orthodox Protestantism, the psychological effect of sin being the only torment

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of the wicked.13 King Benjamin compares the guilt of sin to “an unquenchable fire, whose flames ascendeth up forever and ever,” which only the blessed atonement of Jesus Christ can extinguish.14 Such torment, he explains, “is as a lake of fire and brimstone” (p. 162). This is more like the Protestantism to which the early Saints were said to be partial. However, the appearance of the preposition “as” in too many instances proves problematic: the fires of hell are not meant to be taken literally. In some passages, hell is equated with mere ignorance of the mysteries of God. “And he that will harden his heart,” Alma adjures the rebellious Zeezrom, “to him is given the lesser portion of the word, until they know nothing concerning his mysteries; and they are taken captive by the Devil, and led by his will down to destruction. Now this is what is meant by the chains of Hell” (p. 255). Zeezrom goes straight to hell, where “he began to be harrowed up under a consciousness of his own guilt, yea, he began to be encircled about by the pains of Hell” (p. 262). From an orthodox point of view, this simply will not do. Even passages in the Book of Mormon that discuss the “rest” of the faithful, seeming to toe the orthodox Protestant line, may not be what they seem. The souls of righteous Nephites slain in battle enter “into the rest of the Lord their God” (p. 396), but that “sleep” merely refers to their inanimate remains. Where the text speaks of all men being redeemed, “which bringeth to pass a redemption from an endless sleep, from which sleep all men shall be awoke by the power of God, when the trump shall sound” (p. 536), the reunification of body and soul at the resurrection is all that is meant. Elsewhere “sleep” is a metaphor for ignorance of the mysteries of the gospel. Nephi adjures his wicked brothers: “Awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell” (p. 61). The Book of Mormon discussion of the intermediate state, therefore, lacks the finality and all that goes with it that would be necessary for it to be construed as even remotely orthodox. A Masonic subtext may be partly responsible for such eschatological eccentricity, but more than that a set of Swedenborgian-like ideas seems to drive the Book of Mormon discussion of end things. Swedenborg was not simply a fan of Masonry; mystical Masons were also among his biggest fans. Brooke explains that “after Ramsay, the resurgence of a religious hermeticism in eighteenth-century Europe was grounded in the thought of Emmanuel Swedenborg,” which spread throughout various parts of Europe and America and was especially well suited to mystical and Templar orders of Christian Masonry.15 Waite’s New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry contains several references to Swedenborg’s importance as the inspiration for numerous late-eighteenth-century

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French “Swedenborgian Rites.” In 1784 Benedict Chastanier, a French Master Mason and Swedenborgian, established a lodge in London—the Order of Illuminated Theosophists—a “Text Society” that disseminated the revelations of the Swedish prophet.16 There is no need to go so far as to claim descent from Swedenborg, especially since the Book of Mormon does not endorse a gnostic understanding of body and soul. Swedenborgianism rejects the physical resurrection as a step down; according to gnostic propagandists, the body is a corruption of the spirit. The best of all possible worlds is spiritual (although the way Swedenborg describes it, you would never know—there is far too much riotous eating and connubial bliss to fit any normal definition of ethereal existence). The important point is that Swedenborg offers a more likely theological frame of reference for the Book of Mormon discussion of the afterlife and Mormon doctrine than does orthodox Protestant theology. In fact, Swedenborgianism might be said to represent the latest manifestation of the perennial heresy known as Universalism in the long and variegated history of Christian thought. Locating Swedenborg along some intellectual Christian continuum is the first step in understanding precisely where early Mormonism and its unorthodox ideas regarding the future life really belong. Universalism per se traces its origins to the pre-Nicene church father Origen, through Erasmus and the liberal Arminian tradition, bypassing St. Augustine and veering far from both Luther and Calvin. The Reformation purported to go back to the original sources. On the twin matters of the godhead and original sin, it stopped at Augustine. In search of more ancient testimony, Universalists discovered (to their great delight) the heresiarch Origen. In their view, Origen had been unjustly accused and sentenced to oblivion by the courts of the church—ironic but fitting punishment for this early defender of hell’s captives. In their view, Origen had got it right, not Augustine, the latter the author in some respects of the doctrine of predestination that Universalists vehemently reject. In his magnum opus De Principiis, Origen propounds an eschatological scheme for the ultimate salvation of everyone, which his critics assumed did not preclude the devil and his angels—although Origen did not actually teach this.17 His position was that immediately after death a provisional separation occurs: good and bad receive longer or shorter probationary sentences. Not until the judgment at the end of the world are any final decisions handed down. Partial to Gnostic prejudice against all things material and literal, Origin rejected the popular belief in the Parousia—the literal or bodily return of

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Jesus at the end of time—and the judgment, too, which landed him in the church’s bad books. He thought that the punishments doled out to the wicked were self-inflicted and psychological in nature: “Each sinner,” he writes, “kindles his own fire . . . and our own vices form its fuel” (cited on p. 473). Suffering ought to serve some purpose, healing the disobedience of those in hell, and thus come to an end for those so inclined. This was Origen’s doctrine of the apokatastasis or “restoration of all things,” condemned at an Alexandrian council in 400 .. and then again in 543 .. by Justinian at the Council of Constantinople. “Whoever says or thinks that the punishment of demons and the wicked will not be eternal, that it will have an end and that there will then be an apokatastasis of demons and the wicked,” Justinian ruled once and for all, “let him be anathema.”18 Origen’s ideas enjoyed a brief revival in the ninth century but required an intellectual awakening on the scale of the Renaissance and Enlightenment before they could filter down to the masses. Protestantism quickly understood the threat Universalism posed to their hegemony. The Augsburg Confession (1530), article 17, states that “Christ . . . will give pious men eternal life and perpetual joy, but He will condemn impious men and devils to torture without end” (cited on p. 22). The Church of England wanted nothing to do with the notion that “all men shall bee [sic] saved at the length” (cited on p. 23). Likewise, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1649) left Universalists little room to maneuver on the question of the state of men after death, the resurrection of the dead, and the judgment: The bodies of men after death return to dust, and see corruption; but their souls, (which neither die nor sleep,) have an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them. The souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies; and the souls of the wicked are cast into Hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved for the judgment of the great day. Besides these two places for souls separated from their bodies, the scripture acknowledgeth none. . . . For then shall the righteous go into everlasting life, and receive that fulness of joy and refreshing which shall come from the presence of the Lord; but the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments, and be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of the power. As Christ would have us to be certainly persuaded that there shall be a day of judgment, both to deter all men from sin, and for the

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greater consolation of the godly in their adversity; so will he have that day unknown to men, that they may shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful, because they know not at what hour the Lord will come; and may be ever prepared to say, Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.19

The whole matter turns on a theological point. Universalists insist that the mental torment of hell rehabilitates given enough time, whereas orthodox Christianity has consistently maintained in the face of stiff opposition that such anxiety does not qualify as remorse. How can it? Genuine sorrow for sin requires an infusion of grace, and there is no such grace in hell—no possibility of parole, let alone release. That is why they call it hell, after all! Universalists had a point, though, when they countered that this made God the author of sin and, if not, then a real hard case for a beneficent being. D. P. Walker explains: If, then, one wished to diminish or eliminate the revengeful, punishing aspect of God, and to regard the torment of the damned as the inevitable, natural consequence of their sins, it was better to have a hell of only mental torment, or remorse and conscience-stricken guilt, which can be regarded as an automatic result of sin and as not directly caused by any punitive action on God’s part. This kind of mental torment was not available to theologians who wished to preserve the eternity of hell, since, if the damned feel remorse or contrition, as opposed to regret, they must be on the way to salvation; but for advocates of universal salvation it provided a simple and convincing method of reforming the damned.20

To be sure, some Universalists pandered exclusively to the notion of divine mercy.21 “Ultra-Universalists,” Grant Underwood explains, “denied the proposition that there would be any punishment after death, arguing that all such suffering by the wicked would occur during mortality and that at death all would be immediately restored to God.”22 Annihilationists or Destructionists attempted to circumnavigate the problem by going the route of too much justice, extinguishing the wicked together with their suffering. English Arians, Cambridge Platonists, and Philadelphians—Universalists of yet another type—expanded the parameters of human existence to include a disembodied preexistence as another solution to the problem of evil and suffering, absolving the Deity of any culpability by blaming it instead on the poor judgment of celestial free agents. Accordingly, the devil and his angels were all self-made.23 John Locke and William Whiston are among the more famous English Arians to propound such theories.24 Whiston established a society for

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promoting Primitive Christianity, reading the Scriptures and the pre-Nicene fathers in hopes that it would hasten the second coming of Jesus Christ. Whiston’s translation of Josephus was a product of such Universalist-chiliastic fervor. Jeremiah White, distinguished English Platonist and author of The Restoration of All Things (1712), devised a comprehensive Universalist eschatology based on the premise that God is love and mercy triumphant in the end,25 building on the work of Peter Sterry, who thought that God’s love and hellfire were one and the same.26 The damned, Sterry reasoned, not having partaken of the atonement of Jesus Christ, will “drinke of the Cup which he did drinke” and thus share in the resurrection of the just.27 Swedenborg’s is a darker Universalism by comparison, his vision of hell that of orthodox Christianity in many respects but reserved for the truly unrepentant: devils. Smith was not quite prepared to give up hell, either—a necessary evil in the eternal, eschatological scheme of things. Where the Swedish bard and the Mormon prophet seem to agree most in their two-pronged, conservative Universalist assault against Calvinism, however, is their belief in so-called spirit teaching. The good or evil one does in this life is said to be registered on the “spirit body,” so that after death, as Colin Wilson explains, “a man is known for exactly what he is. One’s actions are all important; a naturally good agnostic will achieve a higher status than an uninspired but punctilious churchgoer. ‘Compensation’ must be made for evil in the after-life, but there is no hell—it is a mental state. There is no upward limit to the progress of which the soul is capable, and which continues in the other world.”28 Nephite High Priest Alma speaks at length on this. “Now there must needs be a space betwixt the time of death, and the time of the resurrection,” where the “spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life.”29 He goes on to describe two “states” into which the righteous and wicked are received: happiness and trepidation, respectively. Humankind will be judged according to “the desires of their hearts,” some “raised to happiness” according to their desires, others “to evil” according to their desires. In fact, hell is the “reward” of those who “desire to do evil all the day long,” whereas all sinners who repent and “desire righteousness are delivered from that endless night of darkness; and thus they stand or fall, for behold, they are their own judges, whether to do good or do evil” (p. 336). The “natural man,” Alma explains, is “sensual, carnal and devilish” (p. 337). This is the very heart and soul of Swedenborgian “spirit teaching.” The “natural man” in Swedenborg’s visions is a “sensual man, and, if he continues, [one who] becomes corporeal or carnal.” Alma’s words are not mere Protestant

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(least of all Calvinist) self-deprecation; they are not, as some scholars believe,30 proof that Smith subscribed to the orthodox Christian doctrine of original sin and total depravity. Far from it. In Swedenborg, the “natural man” is a term that refers to “those who are in the hells [who] are sensual, and the more so the deeper they are in them.” They are most often learned, cunning, and crafty individuals who “captivate and ensnare the common people. . . . The covetous, the adulterous, and the deceitful are especially sensual,” he writes, “though to the world they appear to be men of talent. The interiors of their minds are foul and filthy, in consequence of their communication with the hells; and in the Word they are said to be dead.”31 In Swedenborg, to be sensual is not to trust the ethereal or the spiritual. Carnality and devilishness follow. This is the Book of Mormon view as well. Swedenborg-like “spirit teaching” seems to be at the bottom of discussions of the afterlife and nature of sin in the Book of Mormon. In Nephi’s commentary on the allegory of the Tree of Life, “an awful gulf” is said to “separate the wicked from the tree of life, and also from the saints of God.” Then follows a question a Swedenborgian might ask: “Doth this thing mean the torment of the body in the days of probation, or doth it mean the final state of the soul after death of the temporal body, or doth it speak of the things which are temporal?” Nephi’s rejoinder is classic Swedenborg, too. “But behold,” he says, “the kingdom of God is not filthy, and there cannot any unclean thing enter . . . wherefore there must needs be a place of filthiness prepared for that which is filthy.”32 Swedenborg opined that the intermediate state was more of a sorting house where individuals come to terms with who they are, accepting their fate in the end, changing it for the better if they so desire, with incorrigible souls making their way to the work camps of hell and slamming its cast-iron doors behind them of their own accord, for eternity. Some passages in the Book of Mormon that are thought to attack Universalism take on an entirely different meaning if understood as possibly Swedenborgian in nature. For example: “Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die; and it shall be well with us. Nevertheless, fear God, he will justify in committing a little sin. God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the Kingdom of God” (p. 113). The same goes for those who castigate “false churches” for teaching “there is no hell . . . [and] no Devil” (p. 114). Such taunts appear in Swedenborg but are criticisms leveled at Calvinism and not orthodox reaffirmations of the reality of the devil and verity of eternal punishment. In Swedenborg’s dialogues with a novitiate spirit on the true meaning of “delight” (the universal characteristic of heaven and hell), his spokesperson for

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Calvinism defines it as “nothing else but feasting, eating dainties, and drinking, and getting drunk on generous wine.”33 Such polemic is standard issue in Universalist and Arminian circles, because the Reformed doctrine of Predestination is easily misconstrued by its enemies as license to sin. Other passages in the Book of Mormon could go either way, too, especially those that criticize churches for claiming to save people “in their sins” rather than “from their sins.”34 The Calvinist doctrine of election, for example, holds that grace alone (not works or even some combination of grace and works) saves sinners.35 Swedenborg berates Calvinism for not shunning sin and thus causing individuals to “remain in it,” to their great disappointment by and by.36 John Wesley, too, attacked Calvinists for justifying the righteous “in their sins” rather than saving them “from their sins.”37 American Universalist Hosea Ballou accused Calvinism of promising to save people “in their sins,” alleging that certain “doctors of the church” confessed that if no hell existed, they would “live in sin, year after year . . . that it would be better to live in sin if there was no death or condemnation hereafter.”38 They also said, “if we repent just before we die, we are just as safe, as if we repented in youth” (p. 108). Ballou used such testimony (probably apocryphal) to accuse Calvinists of denying the necessity of punishment for sin. Odd, indeed, for Universalists to seem to be so keen to see the wicked suffer or to presume the Calvinist equation of sinfulness with happiness an abomination. This was Swedenborg’s understanding, too. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “wickedness never was [true] happiness.”39 In the Book of Mormon are traces of liberal Protestant things to come. In concert with Cardinal Newman’s belief, the wicked live among the righteous in heaven but in constant mental torment as a consequence. Hell consists of incorrigible sinners only, whereas Heaven is a menagerie of benign, less-thanvaliant souls as well as the great and noble. Divine punishment, in this case, consists of banishment to heaven, not from it, at least for those with a spark of divinity. “Do ye suppose that ye shall dwell with him under a consciousness of your guilt?” one Book of Mormon prophets asks. “Do ye suppose that ye could be happy to dwell with that holy Being, when your souls are racked with a consciousness of your guilt that ye have ever abused his laws?” The answer? “Behold I say unto you, that ye would be more miserable to dwell with a holy and just God, under a consciousness of your filthiness before him, than ye would to dwell with the damned souls in hell. For behold, when ye shall be brought to see your nakedness before God, and also the glory of God, and the holiness of Jesus Christ, it will kindle a flame of unquenchable fire upon you” (p. 535). This may approximate the orthodox Christian understanding; in that vision of

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hell, to be sure, the wicked suffer extreme mental torment. The difference is that in Mormonism such strong pangs of conscience are the product of remorse rather than the instrument of mere punishment. The Book of Mormon’s Swedenborgian-like broadside against Calvinism uses the death of innocent children and damnation of heathens to beat Protestantism generally about the head. It perhaps matters little that most of Protestantism does not believe that children who die without baptism go straight to hell. No matter. “It is solemn mockery before God,” the Book of Mormon remonstrates, that ye should baptize little children. . . . But little children are alive in Christ, even from the foundation of the world: if not so, God is a partial God, and also a changeable God, and a respecter of persons: for how many little children have died without baptism. . . . For awful is the wickedness to suppose that God saveth one child because of baptism, and the other must perish because he hath no baptism. . . . Little children cannot repent; wherefore it is awful wickedness to deny the pure mercies of God unto them, for they are all alive in him because of his mercy. (pp. 581–582)

Perhaps the Book of Mormon means to attack the Catholic doctrine of limbo and possibly Lutherans and the German Evangelical tradition. That said, the Augsburg Confession avows the necessity and efficacy of infant baptism, but, as Charles Hodge explains, some “Lutheran divines . . . affirm that baptism is ordinarily necessary; yet that the necessity is not absolute, so that if its administration be prevented by unavoidable circumstances, the want of baptism is not fatal.”40 Finney exempted infants, too. In the end, whom the Book of Mormon wishes to single out may not extend much beyond Baptists and Campbellites for inadvertently condemning all who, for whatever reason, are not immersed in the waters of baptism. The Book of Mormon’s discussion of the plight of the so-called heathen clearly toes the Universalist line. God’s mercy accommodates “also all they that are without the law. For the power of redemption,” it says, “cometh on all they that have no law.”41 “The curse of Adam is taken away from them . . . it hath no power over them” (p. 581). Orthodox Protestantism is guilty as charged. Hodge explains that “judged according to their works and according to the light which they have severally enjoyed, all men will be condemned” and that the Scriptures teach “the heathen are ‘without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of

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Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God.’ ” And lest any misunderstand, “so far as adults are concerned,” he continues, “salvation must be confined to very narrow limits. . . . It is, therefore, as before stated, the common faith of the Christian world, that, so far as adults are concerned, there is no salvation without the knowledge of Christ and faith in him.”42 That God might throw a little prevenient grace heathenism’s way is repugnant to him. “If this sufficient grace does not actually save, if it does not deliver the heathen from those sins upon which the judgment of God is denounced,” he declares, “it only aggravates their condition” (1:30). It is just such Christian hubris that Smith—with Swedenborg before him and Origen before that—condemns. In his supplement to The True Christian Religion, Swedenborg has much to say “respecting the Gentiles, who have known nothing of the Lord, distinguished according to their genius, and their capacity to receive light through the heavens from the Lord.”43 Here his “spirit doctrine” justifies their natural place in and right to inhabit the heavenly kingdom. They possess more grace than any Calvinist, rejecting the twin “heresies” of God’s ethereal nature and salvation “by faith alone” (pp. 772–773). They are naturally “interior,” the most spiritual of God’s children. St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, is even said to have preached to them, a fitting emissary of the Lord to Africa’s “lost” inhabitants (p. 774). Given what we have seen that opens the text to a Masonic interpretation, that Swedenborg might also be there makes sense. At the same time, the Book of Mormon does not merely duplicate the Swedish philosopher’s cosmology, taking issue with gnosticism for rejecting the bodily (resurrection) in the end and erring on the side of radical materialism where the body of the Father and the millennial reign of the Son are concerned.

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eleven

Father-Son and Holy Ghost–Mother? The Mormon-God Question I had learned to call thee Father, Through thy Spirit from on high; But until the key of knowledge Was restored, I knew not why. In the heavens are parents single? No; the thoughts makes reason stare! Truth is reason, truth eternal Tells me I’ve a mother there. When I leave this frail existence, When I lay this mortal by, Father, Mother, may I meet you In your royal court on high? Then, at length, when I’ve completed All you sent me forth to do, With your mutual approbation Let me come and dwell with you. —Eliza R. Snow, “O My Father”

   of God, Mormon philosopher Sterling McMurrin writes,

T

is a radical departure from the position of traditional theism, whether Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, and the failure to recognize the far-reaching implications of this idea is a failure to come to grips with the somewhat distinctive quality of Mormon theology, its essential non-absolutistic character. . . . The naturalistic disposition of Mormonism is found in the denial of the traditional conception of the supernatural. . . . Reality is described qualitatively as a single continuum. . . . Mormonism conceives of God as being in both time and space. . . . It is perhaps not entirely inaccurate to describe Mormonism as a kind of naturalistic, humanistic theism.1

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   has long troubled orthodox Christians for these reasons. There have been numerous Mormon-Gentile standoffs. The first such encounter occurred in 1837, between the Mormon Elder Stephen Post and Oliver Barr of the Christian Connection. Barr, a Binitarian (one who acknowledges the divinity and personhood of Father and Son only), not a Trinitarian, did not believe the Book of Mormon espoused the orthodox formulation. Post defended the faith by affirming the oneness of God in the Book of Mormon and the Bible.2 By the time of the next equally famous Christological shouting match between Mormon Apostle B. H. Roberts and Idaho Catholic priest C. Van Der Donckt in the early 1900s, later published as Mormon Doctrine of Deity, the Mormon defense, at least, had changed considerably from an unflinching apology for modalistic unity to a defense of what seems a crude anthropomorphism and polytheism.3 Modern Mormon apologies share more with that of Roberts than that of Post.4 The debate over the nature of the Godhead divided Evangelicals and antiEvangelicals in the antebellum period. As Paul Goodman points out in his book Towards a Christian Republic, Evangelicals tended to be Trinitarians, whereas anti-Evangelicals espoused a wide array of Unitarian alternatives.5 Book of Mormon critic Mark Thomas is only partly right when he argues that the Book of Mormon healed “the Gentiles of both their disbelief and Unitarian heresies.”6 In fact, it blamed the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and its philosophical accoutrements for causing widespread disbelief and intense psychological anxiety. Evangelicals were Unitarianism’s most virulent critics and vice versa. Indeed, the Mormon concept of God is perhaps the most contentious issue, second only to polygamy, separating Mormons and mainline Christians.7 The current interpretation essentially invents a Christological dichotomy in the early tradition—when none existed—and largely to lend credence to orthodox tendencies within the modern church. O. Kendall White argues in his book Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy: A Crisis Theology that “during the initial period of the formulation of Mormon doctrine, 1830 to 1835, Mormon beliefs differed little from those of American Protestants. Tempered by the perfectionism of the Methodists, the Mormon doctrine of human nature tended toward depravity, while its absolutist and trinitarian concept of God reinforced a notion of the saving grace provided by the death and atonement of Jesus Christ. As prevalent themes in the Book of Mormon, these were apparently beliefs of the earliest Mormons.”8 White argues for the existence of two Mormonisms in the early period (1830–1844), an orthodox Protestant variety and a radical anti-Evangelical one. In the same vein, Thomas Alexander and Edgar T. Lyon propound the

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notion of a “reconstruction” of Mormon doctrine in the later years of Joseph Smith’s life.9 This fits well with Shipps’s thesis that Mormonism evolved away from Christianity and that in the early years its core doctrines were essentially Protestant.10 Although extremely critical of Mormonism in their book Understanding Cults and New Religions, Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe seem to concur that “with the exception of its teachings about the Fall, [the Book of Mormon] is simple and fundamentally orthodox.”11 However much Mormon theology evolved, especially in the last years of the Mormon prophet’s short life, a more nuanced reading of the Book of Mormon does not support the idea that the Mormon concept of God was ever that of orthodox Christianity—a trinity, in other words. As Melodie Moench Charles has shown, “like the Book of Mormon, Mormonism before 1835 was largely modalistic.”12 In the Book of Mormon, the Father and the Son are the same person— which is not the orthodox Christian understanding.13 The Book of Mormon Christ is not homoousia with the Father but the Father indeed.14 While some passages lend themselves to an orthodox interpretation, a majority vacillate between two unorthodox poles: Arianism, which holds that Jesus was the first and greatest of all creatures rather than coeternal with the Father, and Sabellianism, which holds that the Son was the same person as the Father.15 The Book of Mormon even alludes to the heavenly flesh theory (the peculiar preserve of Anabaptists and equivalent to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation), since the Father of Heaven and Earth is said to come to earth and dwell in a tabernacle of clay.16 Thomas Muntzer, Melchior Hoffman, Kaspar Schwenkfeld, and Menno Simons are among the more famous Anabaptists to espouse this view.17 Michael Servetus (1511–1553), the famous martyr to Calvinistic intolerance, propounded his own heavenly flesh theory. According to Servetus, God was the literal father of Jesus and thus Christ’s mortal body homoousia with the Father.18 Brigham Young arrived at a similar conclusion, defending Jesus as the Son of God rather than the Son of the Holy Ghost (his own take on the orthodox understanding).19 While much of the Christological discussion in the Book of Mormon has a Trinitarian ring to it, the text clearly favors a Sabellian, or Monophysite/Unitarian, interpretation. The brother of Jared sees the finger of God and then, on account of his great faith, the face of God. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, he discovers, is none other than Jesus Christ. As Steven Epperson argues, this is not the orthodox understanding. Jesus and Jehovah are not the same person in Christian theology. It is an “egregious error,” Epperson writes, and “we do violence and disrespect to the person of the Father.”20 Yet, in the

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Book of Mormon, at least, the Father is spirit and the Son is flesh, and, as Sabellius taught, the two are one person in Jesus Christ. While the Mormon concept of God certainly evolved, the important point to remember is that it never quite satisfied all the demands of orthodox Christian doctrine, only becoming more heterodox as time passes. Dan Vogel argues: “Although the earliest Mormon concept of God differs from the belief Joseph Smith outlined in his sermons in the 1840s, later Mormon theology does not trace its roots to trinitarianism or any other orthodox creed. Rather Mormon theology consistently rejected orthodox definitions of God, developing in an increasingly heterodox direction.”21 George B. Arbaugh argued long ago, in his 1932 book Revelation in Mormonism, that the metamorphosis of the Mormon God proceeded from modalistic unity to a hierarchy of gods of flesh and bone—which, incidentally, comes dangerously close to atheism.22 The real irony, however, is that Mormonism’s unequivocal embrace of materialism largely occurred because Smith went on to defend the unity of God using orthodox-sounding arguments, in an attempt to appease new converts, who, increasingly, came from the Protestant quarter, quite unaware of who he really was or what the church he established was all about. His famous lament only months before he died, in which he accuses the Mormon throngs of not knowing his history (or his theology?), can be seen as a plaintive cry in the wilderness for them to take the time to read the Book of Mormon with the right set of lenses and thus come to see Smith for who he really was: a Christian Mason rather than an eccentric, Bible-believing Christian who started with strong primitivist leanings and went off the deep end. That said, in some important respects, the church Smith founded was hugely successful because so few seemed to know what he was going on about right to the bitter end. Even now, almost two hundred years since the publication of the Book of Mormon, the most basic and important of questions—the early Mormon understanding of and belief in God—is a quagmire of theological and philosophical ramblings, fundamentalist rant, and historical non sequitur. Ironically, most historians have tried to stay above it all, while Mormon theologians eager to put in their two cents have not been up to the task—asking all the wrong questions, in effect. A few years ago now, at a fireside reading of a version of this essay, Eugene England, one of the distinguished Mormon scholars to attend, made the following observation. “Must we employ so much of the language of the adversary?” Unfortunately, it would seem so! Still, England had a point, especially when one considers that such “Catholic” theological and philosophical minutiae as Sabellianism or Arianism or Pelagianism (all its neo

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this-and-thats, too) may well be entirely beside the point. Whether the Mormon doctrine of Jesus as Jehovah, for example, should be seen as offensive to Jews and Christians alike because of its apparent lack of theological conformity begs the question. Indeed, Harold Bloom’s intriguing argument for Mormonism as a kind of post-Christian revival of Jewish gnosticism (“The Star Spangled Banner” playing softly in the background) and prediction that Salt Lake City may yet become the religious capital of the West fail to appreciate the very important sense in which Mormonism clearly has a rather large (and literal) bone to pick with gnosticism.23 The rest of this chapter certainly “employs the language of the adversary,” but simply to demonstrate the degree to which the Mormon God stands outside the pale of orthodox Jewish and Christian thought by standing firmly inside time and space, fashioning the universe out of rock and clay older, it seems, than the Deity. How the Mormon God came to be is a question philosophers are better equipped to handle. More germane to this discussion is how the Jesus-Jehovah doctrine came to be and what it hoped to achieve (other than to befuddle systematic theologians, that is). In some respects, that question proves no great hurdle since Christian Masons share this view. It is there, for example, as plain as day in Oliver’s The Book of the Lodge, which characterizes “the Angel Lord of the Covenant—Jehovah— the Messiah, or Christ as types of His presence on the same mountain to work out human salvation by His death upon the cross.”24 Elsewhere, Oliver explains that Christian Masonry is “a cosmopolitan institution, comprehending all mankind in one fold under one Shepherd, and embracing them in the universal scheme of unlimited redemption” (p. 12). Oliver, an ordained Anglican clergyman, certainly knew his Christian theology; he was not the sort of Christian who seems not to know the difference between their (god)head and their hypostasis, likely to fall prey to the Sabellian heresy (the Father and Son merely modes of the one God) out of sheer ignorance. It makes far more sense to suspect that Oliver knew what he was doing by conflating the God of the Old Testament and Christ of the New in the person of Jehovah. The Mormon prophet may not have been quite the ignoramus Alexander Campbell and other contemporaries thought, either. The Book of Mormon makes no bones about it: the God of the Old Testament is the preexistent Christ; Jesus is the person of the Father, donning a “tabernacle of clay” as the Book of Mormon prophet Abinadi explains. The Mormon God as an apology for Christian Masonry has important ramifications for the sons and daughters of God, too, spiritual beings like Jesus their older brother (and Masonry, too)

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who cannot be saved without similar mortal coils. Before coming to this earth, their moral worth and thus religious and racial status is determined in a grand council—an utterly Masonic affair in which Jesus proves himself the best of all possible Masonic sons, head and shoulders above his archenemy and the spiritual source of all apostate Masonry, Satan himself. That Lucifer and his angels are cast out of heaven into outer darkness, never, ever, to receive bodies, is a dream come true for the believing gnostic. The growing interest in Mormonism as a throwback to Jewish or Christian gnosticism has been fueled to some degree by apologists for the faith who hope to show that Mormonism—especially its radical Christology—is essentially that of the first and earliest Christianity. One can hardly blame Mormon apologists for finding it rather exciting, if not simply ironic, that their tradition should seem to have so much in common with the Greek Orthodox Church or that the Roman Catholic wing of the Christian tradition and its Protestant acolytes have had their backs to the wall for some time now, thanks to the higher critics. These days, the believing Mormon intellectual is likely to find a friend in most things German—past and present. Mormon feminists such as Linda P. Wilcox no doubt derive some pleasure when they ask Christian critics to consider that “the idea of a Heavenly Mother or a female counterpart to the male father-god is not unknown in Christianity. Recently discovered Gnostic texts from the first century after Christ reveal doctrinal teachings about a divine mother as well as father. There is also a body of writings which identifies the divine mother as the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity, which then becomes a family group—the Father, Mother, and Son.”25 If only the Mormon belief in a trinity of father, mother, and son—or quaternity of father, mother, son, and holy ghost—appeared somewhere in its own scriptures! Other than the Mormon hymn “O My Father,” which contains a pericope in honor of a heavenly mother figure, the only other evidence for God the Mother seems to be a lot of fairly reliable hearsay evidence (pp. 64–77). In the temple Endowment ceremony, for example, the men and women seated in the pews are not favored with a Masonic theatrical reenactment presided over by the Father and Mother and Holy Ghost. Christian critics have made great sport of this, accusing Mormonism of gross anthropomorphism that goes well beyond the bounds of good taste—particularly the idea Young made famous, that God the Father had sexual intercourse with the non-Virgin Mary. Being such a prolific husband, that Young fashioned God in his own image is the sort of polemic that can easily backfire—and has. But surely the orthodox Christian understanding of God as devoid of “body,

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parts and passions” can be seen as rather unsavory, too? That said, most of this may well be beside the point. Mormon feminists have lobbied hard for God the Mother as an intercessor on par with Mary in the Catholic faith without considering how this great parenthesis in Mormonism’s heaven and in its scriptures may be intentional—a necessary evil. Smith’s willingness to include women, as we will continue to see, set him apart from the Masonic mainstream. To include women as equal participants in the Masonic ritual and offer to make them priests of Melchizedek after the order of the Son of God was as far as it could go, lest Mormonism prove to offer men little beyond what they already had. In short, the Mormon God can be seen as the pitch to men of Masonic temperament perhaps fearful that Mormonism threatened to erode their already diminishing sense of veto power. Indeed, the evolution of the Mormon God from unity to multiplicity and Smith’s constant and creative attempts to preserve unity and justice in the process seem more or less in agreement with the essentially patriarchal notion that ultimately father knows best and is most qualified to run the affairs of church and state above and below.     (1830) and the Lectures on Faith (1835) were subsumed, so the argument goes, by the Doctrine and Covenants (1835–1844), the Book of Abraham (1842), and the King Follett Discourse (1844).26 Smith allegedly “reversed his position on the absolute nature of God.” (p. 91 n. 2). This was not Smith’s understanding, however.27 In June 1844 he told the Saints: “I have always and in all congregations when I preached on the subject of . . . Deity it has been the plurality of Gods” (p. 370). The strong reaction to the King Follett Discourse, as Van Hale points out, “creates the impression that Joseph Smith shocked the Saints with a startling revelation of new doctrine, previously unknown to the members.”28 Such concepts as “men can become gods, there exist many gods, the gods exist one above the other, and God was once as man is now,” Hale comments, appear no less than forty-five times in the early Mormon literature before April 1844 and developed in a linear sequence. Robert Paul notes that Smith’s cosmology was “surprisingly self-consistent and coherent.”29 Early references to the plurality of worlds idea, according to Paul, implied other forms of Mormon pluralism merely stated more clearly and forcefully later on. The astronomical pluralism in the Book of Moses—published the same year as the Book of Mormon—Paul argues, “carried over into Joseph [Smith’s] increasingly sophisticated [polytheistic] theology” (p. 27). However, the suggestion that Smith’s ideas did not evolve to some degree goes too far the other way. After all, other astronomical pluralists, Christian30

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and anti-Christian,31 did not assume that many worlds implied many gods. Indeed, the belief that God had populated other worlds was widely held among Deists and Newtonians. Neither sanctioned polytheism, and, in fact, most who held this view were Christian Neoplatonists and Arians. J. Frederick Voros Jr. contends that Smith’s “views on doctrine changed over time” and that “the King Follett Discourse, which expands the frontiers of Mormon doctrine far beyond Book of Mormon teachings, is obviously a dramatic example: the one, changeless God of the Book of Mormon becomes a plurality of exalted persons in King Follett.”32 He is uneasy, however, about what he perhaps rightly calls “a false dichotomy between the Book of Mormon and the King Follett Discourse” (p. 18). One can find in Smith’s revelations and sermons on the Godhead, for example, a Neoplatonist-like chant to unity amid diversity. Christian Neoplatonism traces its origins to Plotinus, the third-century Egyptian philosopher. Plotinus, a monist, conceived of reality as a vast hierarchical structure with grades descending from the One. Beneath the One was the second hypostasis, Mind or Thought; and below Mind, the third hypostasis, Soul. All that existed, Plotinus averred, was essentially an “overflow” of the One.33 Once again, we proceed directly to Origen, a contemporary of Plotinus who attempted to harmonize Christianity and Neoplatonism. Origen hypothesized that God was a being of perfect goodness and power who brought into existence a world of spiritual beings coeternal with himself. This plurality required a mediator, the Son, the first in the chain of emanations, making him a “secondary God” but God all the same and the express image of the Father. Origen also believed the Spirit was a divine person, sharing, albeit derivatively, all the characteristics of the Father. The plurality of spiritual beings, coeternal with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, were thus gods in embryo.34 Two Platonist revivals preceded the nineteenth century: that of the Medici Florentine Academy in the sixteenth century and that of the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century—which precipitated a Christian Neoplatonic tradition in England and America. The most influential American Neoplatonist was Jonathan Edwards. As Douglas Elwood, the Edwardsian scholar, explains, Edwards’s “great overarching concern was to reconstruct the framework of historic Calvinism along Neoplatonic lines.”35 The triune God of Edwards was one in thought. “We don’t suppose that the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost . . . have three distinct understandings,” he observed. “We never supposed that [the] Father generated the Son by understanding the Son, but that God generated the Son by understanding his own essence. . . . And so of the Holy Ghost.”36 Edwards even believed that humanity first resided in the

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Father: “Here is both the emanation and rumination. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are reflected back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and he is the beginning and the middle and the end” (cited on p. 61). Smith’s other 1830 publication, the Book of Moses,37 is an Arian defense of the unity of God. It can be seen as a unitarian argument rather than the first intrusion of polytheism into Mormonism, as some scholars maintain. After seeing a vision of the world from beginning to end, Moses discovers that creation is the work of the Father by the Son (Moses 1:30–32). It is not the Father who is Creator, but the Son (Moses 1:33, 35).38 The Son is also separate from the Father, something more than the power of God but not a divine person in his own right—not yet, that is (Moses 2:26–27). The Book of Moses largely addresses the issues of evil and suffering and the God of love. If God created all things, does it not follow that he also created evil? But how is it that a supremely good being should be said to create evil? Augustine attempted to resolve this problem by defining evil as privation of good, in the same way that darkness is merely the absence of light.39 The Book of Moses, however, asserts that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers who competed for the position of Son of God in a preexistence (Moses 4:1–4). Lucifer proposes that God should compel his children to be righteous. In exchange for carrying out this mission on earth, Lucifer asks to be equal with God. Jesus makes no such demands. His is the chosen plan, and he will become the Father’s cosmological subcontractor and the future Messiah (Moses 3:5). That Lucifer’s request to be equal to the Father is deemed “sinful” may be a rebuke directed at women as well as men—a none-too-subtle reminder to the Fanny Stenhouses of the faith that, in matters of home and church governance, the Father, as it were, has no equals. (That Lucifer had a radical, Evangelical-feminist agenda, that he spoke on behalf of and thus his angels were largely women, may not be outside the realm of exegetical possibility.) In fact, an argument similar to this appears in the Scottish Rite and its defense in the higher degrees of the necessity of both good and evil in the interest of the freedom of the will. In short, good cannot exist without evil: without the devil, God would not be God. The black-and-white tile floor of the lodge symbolizes this dualistic cosmic drama between the Deity and his opposite over the souls of humankind, free agents in the whole affair and thus the final arbiters in their own salvation (though not without the aid of prevenient grace). It is not a fair fight in the end, for good will certainly triumph, in large

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measure because of the efforts of a mediator (Jesus Christ). This may sound orthodox, but it seems more than likely a Masonic variation on a Manichaean/ gnostic theme. “For it must needs be,” the Book of Mormon says, “that there is an opposition in all things . . . wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man, that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself, save it should be that he were enticed by the one or the other.”40 In his famous Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Albert Pike defends just such an argument at length. The lesson of the Scottish Trinitarian, or Twenty-sixth Degree, is that “the Infinite and Benevolence of God give ample assurance that Evil will ultimately be dethroned, and the Good, the True, and the Beautiful reign triumphant and eternal. It teaches, as it feels and knows, that Evil and pain, and Sorrow exist as part of a wise and beneficent plan, all the parts of which work together under God’s eye to a result which shall be perfection.”41 In this degree, the necessity of baptism and what is called “the fraternal supper” of bread and wine are also expounded, the latter in remembrance of the blood Christ shed for the remission of sins (pp. 538–540). In orthodox Christian teaching, only the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, along with the devil and his angels, are preexistent beings. The preexistence of human souls who will come to earth and inhabit bodies of flesh and blood is a Neoplatonic teaching, quite inconsistent with orthodox Christianity and yet in keeping with the teachings of the Scottish Rite. This should not come as any great surprise since the Scottish Rite is Neoplatonic through and through. Among other things, the Knight of the Brazen Serpent, or Twenty-fifth Degree, teaches “the pre-existence of souls, as pure and celestial substances, before their union with our bodies, to put on and animate which they descend from Heaven” (p. 440). The logic employed here is similar to that in Mormon scripture: that it seems ludicrous to suppose “the soul should exist after the body, if it had not existed before it, and if its nature was not independent of that of the body.” In the Seventeenth Degree, or Knight of the East and West, “the Word is not only the Creator, but occupies the place of the Supreme Being. . . . God gives to man the Soul or Intelligence, which exists before the body, and which he unites with the body emanating from the Deity of all spiritual beings” (p. 251). The Logos is also said to be the “Chief of Intelligence,” or Adam Kadmon (similar to one of the names on the Smith family tracing board, as it happens). In the Book of Moses, the Son is the “Only Begotten” of the Father (Moses 4:1), the Arian understanding, and not, as the Westminster Confession says, “eternally begotten.”42 The passages that refer to him as “the same which was from the

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beginning” can be read in connection with the passage “Beloved and Chosen from the beginning” (Moses 4:2). A slight departure from the modalistic concept of God in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses does not endorse polytheism per se. Rather, it is an Arian defense of the unity of God and a thinly veiled Neoplatonic theodicy. Again, the Scottish Rite seems a near-perfect fit, for the Scottish Trinitarian is also instructed in the mystery of a “Son, or first Man AdamKadmon,” the offspring of the Supreme Being “who commenced the contest with the Powers of Evil, but, losing part of his panoply, of his Light, his Son and many souls born of the Light, who were devoured by the darkness, God sent to his assistance the living Spirit, or the Son of the First Man . . . or Jesus Christ.”43 Indeed, in the Scottish Rite is something like the progressive doctrine of the Trinity that Smith would spring on the Saints late in the game, as we will see. In May 1833, having just completed a first draft of his Inspired Version, Smith received another revelation, now LDS Doctrine and Covenants 93, a more blatant Neoplatonic utterance. It states that humanity preexisted “individually” with the Father.44 “At the first organization in heaven,” Smith later wrote, “we were all present and saw the Saviour chosen, and appointed, and the plan of salvation made and we sanctioned it.”45 “The Father and I are one,” it says, “the Father because he [the Father] gave me [the Son] of his fullness, and the Son because I was in the world and made flesh my tabernacle, and dwelt among the sons of men.” This is a Sabellian argument (93:3–4). Yet the Son is also “the Firstborn” of the Father, an Arian argument (93:21). In the final verses, a Neoplatonic argument appears: “Ye were also in the beginning with the Father; that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth. . . . For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably, receive a fullness of joy. The elements are the tabernacle of God; yea, man is the tabernacle of God” (93:23, 33, 35). Smith’s radical ideas concerning an individual preexistence and multiplicity of gods gave impetus to much discussion and dissension. Not all early Mormon converts could grasp them. Some even found them troubling. Joseph Lee Robinson, an early convert, summed up the problem when he wrote: “Some elders said that the prophet Joseph Smith should have said that our spirits existed eternally with God, the question then arose, How is God the Father of our spirits?”46 Orson Pratt explored the problems associated with the notion of an individual preexistence in depth. In an 1853 work entitled The Seer that expands on ideas in two of his earlier works, “The Absurdities of Immaterialism” and “The First Great Cause,” Pratt carved a middle road between immaterialist absolutism,47 on the one hand, and materialist finitism, on the other. He

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speculates that the elements—atoms—existed independently, necessarily, and eternally; God merely organized them into countless spirit bodies. In response to Robinson and other Evangelical Mormons, Pratt argued in favor of the human soul as eternally begotten in an evolutionary sense. Once again, the Scottish Rite seems to unlock the mystery. In the Knight of the Sun, the Twenty-eighth Degree, the “universal soul,” Pike explains, “was of extreme antiquity . . . the Universe, in its totality and in its parts . . . filled with intelligences, that might be regarded as so many emanations from the sovereign and universal intelligence.” The soul “was the vehicle, and, as it were, the envelop of the intelligence that attached itself to it, and could repose nowhere else. Without a soul there could be no intelligence.”48 The context here is important to keep in mind: it concerns the planets as living souls and having intelligence; the Mormon understanding represents a creative departure rather than mere duplication (as we have seen over and over). The year 1835 marks another Christological development, enshrined in a missionary pamphlet that Smith approved for the instruction and edification of Mormon missionaries, the Lectures on Faith. Boyd Kirkland argues that the Lectures on Faith “emphasized the complete separateness of the Father and the Son,” a development, in his view.49 Likewise, Blake Ostler notes that pluralism in Mormon Christology appeared about the same time as the Lectures on Faith. As early as 1835—but not earlier, one assumes—“the persons of the Trinity were distinguished,” Ostler writes, and “the ultimate basis of reality was defined in pluralistic terms.”50 By the early 1840s, however, the Lectures on Faith had been rendered essentially obsolete in many other details, or so the argument goes.51 Smith’s 1843 teaching that “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” abnegated the Lectures on Faith.52 Consequently, several attempts have been made to distance Smith from the treatise.53 In any event, the Lectures on Faith do not depart in any radical sense from the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses. The characterization of the Father as “a spirit” in the Lectures on Faith is a facet of an earlier revelation that calls the Father “that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth.”54 The Book of Mormon (Mosiah 3:5) and Doctrine and Covenants 93:4 term the Son a tabernacle of clay and flesh, respectively; the Father, by implication, is ethereal in nature. The Lectures on Faith also emphasize the oneness of God in no less than four of the seven chapters.55 The immutability argument is repeated again and again in defense of the proposition that a God who does not change evokes faith. The concluding chapters, five through seven, contain references to the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, “the great matchless, governing, and

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supreme power over all things, by whom all things were created and made . . . possess[ing] the same mind, the same wisdom, glory, power and fullness—filling all in all” (pp. 44, 48–49; see also pp. 62–63).56 Not unlike the Book of Mormon, the Lectures on Faith imply that the Father is “spirit” and the Son “the flesh of God.”57 In this case, the Christian Masonic agenda underlying nearly everything in the Book of Mormon provides the simplest explanation. The God of the Old Testament and of Judaic Masonry was Jesus, a spirit. He is the Father until he comes into the world and is clothed in flesh, a tangible body making him the Son. Father and Son are one and the same supreme Christian Masonic Knight foretold in scripture. Here, the message to women might be that the righteous men and women of the church, like the godhead, possess the same mind, the same wisdom, glory, power, and fullness, and so there is no fear of a male dictatorship. That the third member of the trinity, the Holy Ghost, is added to the mix may be meant to be seen as a female principle rather than of the female gender. Whether a female is among their number or not, that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are meant to set the standard for governance of church and home seems clear. In 1839 Smith officially denounced creation ex nihilo. “The Spirit of Man is not a created being; it existed from Eternity and will exist to eternity. Anything created cannot be eternal, and earth, water &c—all these had their existence in an elementary state from eternity.”58 Ostler, who has published extensively on the subject of the Mormon God, admits that Smith’s ideas seem to be drawn from Christian Neoplatonism but notes that “ironically, both [the early Christian] apologists and Joseph Smith adopted identical statements to affirm diametrically opposed views.”59 A host of scholars maintain that “between 1838 and 1844, Smith introduced the notion of an infinite lineal hierarchy of Gods.”60 The Book of Abraham played an important role. The Father is said to “dwell in the midst of them all [the intelligences],” ruling both “in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath” (Abraham 3:18–19). The Father is supreme, at the center of things, a divine monism from which the cosmological plethora spilled out. Easily mistaken for mere polytheism, Smith’s literal translation of the Hebrew noun for God, elohim, as plural and, along with other Hebrew words with pluralistic connotations around this time, once again merely shores up his argument for the Son as the Father, the God of the Old Testament and of Judaic Masonry.61 The King Follett Discourse is often characterized, at least by LDS Mormons, as Smith’s greatest sermon.62 Ostler explains: “Joseph Smith’s concept of man

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culminated in April of 1844. In the King Follett Discourse, he presented a view of man unique to the Christian world and rarely matched in the history of thought for its positive characterization of man.”63 The King Follett Discourse is anything but unique. Its basic premise, that humans can become like God, is as old as time itself, looking back to the anthropomorphism of bygone days. In 1841 the biblical passage that says Christ did “all things that he had seen the Father do” caused Smith to speculate that “the Father took life unto himself precisely as Jesus did.”64 In 1843 Smith received two revelations to confirm this, the first, in April, now LDS Doctrine and Covenants 130, reads: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s”; the second, in May, now LDS Doctrine and Covenants 131, makes the bold assertion that there “is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter.”65 Brooke suggests that the second should be interpreted as an occult notion and thus consistent with Neoplatonism.66 Ostler is surely right, however, to detect in the Mormon understanding of the Deity a Neoplatonism of flesh and bone—which is no Neoplatonism at all. Mormonism veers far from the Scottish Rite, too, which speaks eloquently of the soul returning to the God who gave it, the “restoration of all things” a purely spiritual reunion of man and his maker—of God man and man of God. There may be a simpler explanation more germane to the Book of Mormon and the notion of Christ as the Father or God of the Old Testament: it could be a defense of Christian Masonry as the ancient and true priesthood order. To be sure, it is tempting to see Smith’s 1840 revelations as simply conflating the sacred and the secular,67 immolating God’s transcendence in his immanence,68 and thus verging on pantheism if not atheism.69 Was Mormonism suddenly in danger of collapsing into materialism? With matter, not mind as the fundamental principle, was Mormon theology indistinguishable from anthropology, too? Certainly, but neither of these was really the question. That humans could now become gods because God the Father had once been a human being may have had more to do with filling a vacuum in heaven that Smith’s defense of Christian Masonry (Jesus as Jehovah) had created.70 The real danger, however, seems to be the specter of a dead-level equality in heaven. Although God the Father is said to be a former human being,71 and the faithful are to aspire to be future gods just like him, in no sense will they ever become his equal.72 One wonders whether the women of the church got their backs up here, for buried between the lines of this theological double-talk was more than a hint of patriarchal absolutism. Although women were to aspire to become priests just like their husbands, they should not assume to be equal to

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men. One thing is clear. No one quite knew what to make of any of this. A demographic shift in the church only made matters worse, a bevy of British converts from the radical Christian quarter who might indeed assume that their prophet had simply become an atheist without realizing it and was going to drag them down with him. Acutely aware of the fact that his King Follett sermon failed to resolve the issue or satisfy his British-Mormon audience, Smith made another attempt in June, just days before his death, suggesting that God the Father only seemed supreme because he was the only member of the great pantheon with whom humanity had any dealings.73 Even the Deity did not operate in a vacuum, nor was he allowed to behave as he pleased without catching hell. Smith also speculated that the unity of the Godhead was a matter of consensus or agreement—a view he supported using the Greek (p. 372). His contention that God the Father had a Father was perhaps the most ingenious, mysterious, and possibly unintentionally misleading of all his apologies for Christian Masonry: “If Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and John discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ had a Father, you may suppose that He had a Father also. Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way. . . . Hence, if Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that He had a Father also?” (p. 373). Moreover, he made his case in terms new converts could not dispute: the authorized version of the Bible, as originally translated, taught that God the Father had a Father.74 Revelation 1:6 was his proof text. It reads: “And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father.” Smith declared unequivocally that the passage was “altogether correct in the translation” (p. 370). His sudden change of heart and unshakable faith in the original translation of the Bible is telling. In 1833 Smith had seen fit to correct this same passage, probably because it contradicted his argument in the Book of Mormon for Jesus as the Father and thus God of the Old Testament. Adding another Father above the Father (or rather Father-Son) can be seen as a retreat of sorts into Trinitarianism rather than more brazen polytheism.75 The Scottish Rite suggests as much, positing a purely spiritual essence above God the Father and his Son, what Pike calls the “Supreme Cause and God of Gods.”76 Whatever Smith may have meant by this—a pantheon of God-the-Fathers reaching into infinity or something numerically in keeping with the Christian understanding of the three persons of the Trinity—it was a chink in the armor of the early Mormon defense of Christian Masonry as having the blessing of heaven, of reaching all the way back to

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a grand (Masonic) council in heaven where it was decided that Jesus would be Father and then Son to Jewish and then Christian Masonry.77 More important, though, if seen as a thinly veiled defense of male veto power, whether the Holy Ghost may indeed be God the Mother seems unimportant (although it is in the Scottish Rite, too, as the necessity of a male and female principle in the creation of the world)78 when one ponders the likely gender of Lucifer’s followers—lobbyists for an equal rights amendment to the divine rule of heaven that gets struck down, one-third of the heavenly hosts going down with it. Mother in heaven undoubtedly marched in lockstep with Father and Son (as was her place), trampling underfoot a demonic-inspired, Evangelical-feminist–like campaign for equality per se. The Father-above-theFather idea as a thinly veiled discussion of patriarchal governance (of church and state) seems altogether amenable to a political interpretation: a petition of sorts to Congress, to the Supreme Court, to the president, perhaps, to take matters in hand and haul state legislatures on the carpet for their patriarchal abuses of power and infringements against the civil rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution. The extermination order issued by the governor of Missouri and the failure of the federal government to intercede to protect the Mormons from the mob are cases in point. Only days after the God of Mormondom leaped from the pot and into the fire, according to Christian critics, Smith fell to his death from a two-story jail window after being mortally wounded by vigilantes—Governor Ford of Illinois failing to come to the rescue. That the King Follett sermons coincide with Smith’s presidential campaign also suggests that they were in the nature of a stump speech and a defense not of polytheism in heaven or on earth—nothing so democratic as that—but rather more veiled jeremiad that the federal government assert itself, exercise its patriarchal prerogative, and defend the Saints (as among America’s last and greatest admirers of the Republican-Masonic vision of the founding fathers) against an encroaching Evangelical liberalism that threatened to tear at the fabric of both home and homeland.

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IV

the millennial, racial, economic, and political confederacy

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  Arnold Friberg, Helaman Leads an Army of 2,000 Ammonite Youths The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).

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twelve

thy kingdom come: on earth as it is in heaven O ye Millerites, ye made a great mistake; you thought the first thing was the coming of the Lord in power and great glory; you were going to have him come immediately, without any kingdom to come to. —Parley P. Pratt Many have thought that all will believe in the revelations of the Lord Jesus Christ when the kingdom of God is fully established; but they will not; and if those characters were in heaven, they might believe, but would not obey the revelations of Jesus Christ. . . . The kingdom of God will grow out of this Church and the time appears to have been hastened faster than we anticipated. This is the best time we ever saw. We are happy, and we make a heaven of every place to which we go, which is the reason we are happy. —Brigham Young

    Christian Church, its remarkable rise from the ashes of Roman intolerance and growth in the years before and after Constantine’s conversion, may have much to do with what one scholar calls “The Apocalyptic Vision and Its Transformation.”1 Primitive Christians chanted maranatha, “Come Lord, come!” Jesus repeatedly said, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” and his miracles signaled the nearness of that kingdom. Ascending into heaven, he promised to return in glory before the present generation should pass away. The Parousia, or Second Coming, did not occur when or how early Christians imagined. An eschatological adjustment is detectable in Paul’s letters. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, for example, Christ’s coming is said to take place in the apostle’s lifetime (1 Thess. 4:13–17). However, by the time he wrote Philippians, his enthusiasm had cooled considerably (Phil. 1:19–25). The Gospels themselves proffer several possible and indeed competing scenarios, none of which are unequivocally apocalyptic. Jesus does not prognosticate the time of the end with any real precision. Luke and Acts, more than Mark and

T

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Matthew, ease the sense of urgency: Jesus sits at the right hand of God while the church he established redeems the world (Luke 24:51 and Acts 2:33, 3:20–21). The Fourth Gospel, more than Luke and Acts, lessens apocalyptic exigency, diverting attention away from future fulfillment to the realm of the inward and personal. The inner life of the sinner is the seat of divine government in John.2 The Pastorals, the author of 2 Peter, in particular, justify the seeming delay, rationalizing that a day to God is a thousand years to mankind and thus what seems long to the one is truly brief in the larger cosmological scheme of things (2 Peter 3:8–10). Yet the revelation ascribed to St. John (undoubtedly penned by rogue disciples with a revisionist apocalyptic agenda) propounds a chiliastic vision of political and communal conquest, not religious and individual mastery,3 compounding the problem since its millenarian predictions do not come to pass. A truant Christ returns bodily in the Eucharist in the nick of time—a suspension and fulfillment of millennial hope. The early petition “Come Lord, come! And may the world pass away” would, given enough time, inexorably become a prayer “for the Caesars, for their ministers, and for all who are in high positions; for the commonwealth of the world; for the prevalence of peace,” and, perhaps most important of all, “for the delay of the end.”4 Augustine saw what really lay ahead, reinterpreting Revelation 20 and the millennial kingdom of God as the first thousand years of the Christian Church, its mission being simply a campaign to help individuals remain unsullied by this present world. He meant Christ no injury, merely putting off the final judgment and resurrection of the dead both great and small until the very end, giving humankind a little more time in which to prepare. At that time, the church appeared to be losing its battle with a wicked world. Conceding defeat without proclaiming the other side victorious might be scriptural after all (with just a little teasing). Christian eschatology, Jaroslav Pelikan explains, is a dialectic. “If the teachings of the early church and of Jesus could simply be described as consistent eschatology, we could then trace the decline of such an eschatology,” he writes, “as the primary factor in the establishment both of ecclesiastical structures and of dogmatic norms. Neither primitive Christianity nor the church catholic was consistent in so single-minded a way.”5 “The plain fact,” he argues, was that the categories of an undifferentiated apocalyptic were inadequate to the needs of a faith whose content was a history that had already happened. In the teaching of Jesus its “not yet” had stood in dialectic with the “already” of his visible presence. Both poles of the dialectic appeared in his words and deeds, as these

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were remembered by the church. When the apocalyptic vision was eclipsed, however, many of those words and deeds appeared enigmatic. . . . To deny the historical character of the first coming, as Gnostic Docetism did, or to spiritualize the second coming into a parable of the soul, as Origenistic speculation did, was to subvert the apostolic doctrine. . . . But once the dialectic of already/not yet is permitted to emerge from the texts, the magnitude of the change may become visible. It was nothing less than the decisive shift from the categories of cosmic drama to those of being, from the Revelation of St. John the Divine to the creed of the Council of Nicea. Yet it was through that very creed that the human portrait of the Son of Mary was preserved, and by the very creed that the postapocalyptic generations of the church catholic were taught to look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. (pp. 130–132)

,   than Catholics, seemed to forget this, choosing between the already and not yet, threatening to undo what the founder of Christianity may or may not have intended: an apocalyptic vision in (the) Word, not deed. Protestant revisionists such as Albert Schweitzer went over Augustine’s head, but in this instance Origen proved egregious, imbibing Gnostic heresy, which denies the physical resurrection and the bodily advent of Jesus. Reading far too selectively, Schweitzer concluded that Augustinian Christianity had underestimated Jesus’ debt to apocalypticism, among other things.6 Disciples of the not yet would take this information and run with it, putting Christianity on a collision course with itself by drawing a straight line between their own (neoJudaic) dreams of chiliastic empire and the so-called apocalyptic vision of the early church. These radical premillennialists often saw themselves as part of an unbroken chain of underground popular revolt on par with Jesus’ anticlericalism and disestablishmentarianism—the Montanists of second-century Asia Minor, the Bohemian followers of Jan Huss and the bitter fifteenth-century Czech reform movement, the sixteenth-century mystical Dutch and early South German-Austrian Anabaptists, the Fifth Monarchy Men and other radical Puritans of seventeenth-century England and America, and eighteenth-century Republican apocalyptic writers. The Millerites and, for that matter, early Mormons seem perfect candidates for inclusion.7 The early church had its fair share of millenarian enthusiasm, Augustine notwithstanding. The early Apologists—Justin, Barnabas, Cerinthus, and Papias—employed premillennialist arguments to counter the Gnostics, who denied the physical resurrection, the implication being that the human soul had

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a divine right to heaven without delay and possibly with or without Christ’s blessing. In its battle with Gnosticism, the church had to walk a fine line, on constant guard not to seem to make of Christianity a purely spiritual or political entity. Indeed, too much of the latter had been the Jews’ great mistake, which Christian heretics—premillennialists, in short—seemed eager to repeat.8 Calvin certainly, less so Luther, sided with Augustine. According to Hodge, the orthodox Protestant doctrine does not subscribe to an earthly, intermediate kingdom with Christ and the faithful as his chief governors of world affairs, this theocratic governance lasting a thousand years, after which the general resurrection, final judgment, and end of the world occur in rapid succession.9 Orthodox Protestants, not unlike orthodox Catholics, plead for greater vigilance but much patience, too. Hodge explains: “The Church waited four thousand years for the first advent; we may be content to wait God’s time for a second” (3:868). According to the orthodox Protestant mainstream, premillennialism is crass, anthropomorphic, and, as Hodge puts it, altogether “a Jewish doctrine” (3:862). Orthodox Protestants, then, locate Jesus’ second advent at the very end of world history. Tending to frown on literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation, they look forward to a universal diffusion of the gospel and, consequently, the conversion of the Jews, but as part of a progressive and expansive vision for the future. As a rule, they reject out of hand the literal restoration of Israel and the unique premillennialist dream of a separate Jewish state before or during the millennium, most of all the idea that the temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt and blood sacrifices reinstituted. As Hodge explains, the New Jerusalem and Zion “are the Church and not the city made with hands” (3:809). Similarly, believers are the spiritual seed rather than natural descendants of Abraham. To propound a biological determination abnegates Jesus’ fundamental message, which did away with such distinctions as Jew and Gentile, enslaved and free, male and female, making all equal partakers of the spirit of universal peace. Christian apocalypticism, in principle at least, is an oxymoron. It threatens to resurrect the primitive antipathy between Jew and Gentile that the founder of Christianity fought so hard to eradicate. The conflict between postmillennialism and premillennialism, then, is a conflagration between Christianity, on the one hand, and its Judaizers, on the other. Before the nineteenth century, postmillennialism and premillennialism in American overlapped considerably. Ruth Bloch explains: Although some religious historians have maintained that these divisions extend back to the seventeenth century, it has recently been demonstrated that before

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the end of the eighteenth century there was little polarization along premillennial and postmillennial lines. Earlier premillennialist and postmillennialist interpretations were respectively linked with a seemingly infinite combination of magical, naturalistic, optimistic and pessimistic points of view. Even in the 1790’s, differences between premillennialists and postmillennialists did not correspond clearly to wider progressive and fatalistic world-historical outlooks: There were still both activistic premillennialists and pessimistic postmillennialists.10

  rather than choosing between the two.11 Revolutionary War rhetoric, she points out, used both postmillennialist and premillennialist language. The lines that divided the two camps were not as yet clear. Following the war, however, American millennialism began its long and protracted transformation from the political activist vision of the Revolutionary period to the more theocentric reformist vision of the antebellum period.12 Premillennialism, Bloch argues, was “far more compatible with Republican than with Federalist politics.”13 Ideas about the French Revolution, she writes, were usually positive, even enthusiastic, still expressing typically Republican rather than Federalist political sentiments. Within the volatile political culture of the 1790s, the distinctively conservative, Federalist, and francophobic millennial literature produced in New England in such great quantities between 1798 and 1800 has gained a false reputation as the predominant political expression of millennial thought of the decade. Far from being the special province of the Federalist clergy, millennial speculation in the 1790s appears initially to have suited religious Republicans far more. Under the combined stimulus of the French Revolution and domestic political conflicts, the renewed politicization of millennial thought in the mid-1790s occurred primarily along francophilic and often even radical-Republican lines. (pp. 185–186)

The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 allied Republican and premillennialist ideas. Herman Husband, a Republican lay preacher who helped foment the rebellion, couched his critique of Federalist politics in decidedly premillennialist terms. The prophecies of Ezekiel, he believed, foretold an American schism, a conflict between East and West. The West, in his view, would become the New Jerusalem.14 Christopher Love, another rabid anti-Federalist and exponent of radical French Freemasonry, employed inflammatory political rhetoric unmis-

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takably premillennialist in tone.15 In America at least, premillennialism had obvious political overtones and applications. Premillennialism quickly became the popular alternative to the postmillennialist and spiritualist tendencies of the Enlightenment.16 In the early nineteenth century, England begat several such reactionary premillennialist countermovements.17 In the summer of 1826 the London cleric Edward Irving translated a little-known millenarian treatise by Manuel Lacunza, an equally obscure Chilean Jesuit. Lacunza renounced the Roman Catholic Church, taking issue with the Augustinian teaching that Christianity fulfilled the prophecies concerning Israel foretold by the Hebrew prophets. Lacunza believed that the gathering of Israel was literal, not a mere allegory for the rise of the Christian Church. Adopted by radical Protestants, Lacunza’s eschatology gave impetus to a new Christian apocalyptic hybrid known as Dispensationalism. Irving borrowed from Lacunza, hoping to amend Historicism (the conservative orthodox Protestant or premillennialist belief in the ability to predict the precise hour of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, among other things) and skillfully avoid its self-destructive tendency. (Historicists down through the ages have tended to prognosticate the day of the Lord with far too much precision.18 ) A charismatic blunder proved Irving’s undoing.19 Indeed, this new branch of premillennialism might have died out had the Irish-born Dispensationalist (or Futurist, another term for the same thing) John Nelson Darby not appeared as auspiciously as some thought the Messiah should have.20 Those for whom modernization had already exacted a heavy toll gravitated toward rather less optimistic eschatological and sociopolitical scenarios, ideas, and communities. The premillennialist–anti-Evangelical notion that things would get much worse before they got appreciably better—which emphasized too strongly the attendant bad news of the eschaton, or Second Coming— made most sense to those who knew firsthand that things had become much worse for themselves despite increased opportunities for advancement. However, it also appealed to a few well-to-do folk who, despite their privileged economic positions, still might despair. Whether they had a right to feel cheated or not, many of the truly disenfranchised and some of the psychologically troubled pined for the day when Jesus would appear bodily in the clouds and wipe away their tears.21 This resurgent pessimism found its most articulate defender in the famous William Miller. A moderate premillennialist of the Historicist persuasion, Miller predicted the end of the world in 1843 and then in 1844. When Christ failed to show (p. 58), he lost some followers but not all.22 Long before the

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great disappointment, as it was called, when Christ failed to appear, Smith had been careful to distance himself and his movement, despite the Millerites’ fantastic growth in the 1830s and 1840s. “Brother” Smith and “Father” Miller had much in common.23 Both their families had resided in Poultney, Vermont, and sympathized with Universalists and Deists. Smith and Miller were devotees of such popular infidelity and critical of the Evangelical establishment. Both prophesied that the end was imminent. And both had a huge following despite extraordinary miscalculations (Miller’s were chronological; Smith’s social and political).24 Neither movement suffered to the point of extinction. (As we know, prophecy seldom really fails if one believes strongly enough.) The two differed mainly on points of Christian doctrine. On the issue of grace, Smith was an Arminian, Miller a Calvinist. Miller objected to the literal return of the Jews to their homeland—in keeping with the Augustinian or spiritualist view that holds that the restoration of Israel refers to the Christian Church, not the Jews. Smith went even further than Lacunza, speculating that the restoration of Israel included any and all willing Jews but also the lost tribes and any other Hebrews, the North American Indians, and even Gentiles. Clearly the biggest difference, however, was Smith’s apparent hesitation to commit to a firm date for the Lord’s Second Coming; he constantly hedged his bets.25 In June 1831 he promised the Saints they would “live to see it come [the second advent] with great glory.”26 Later, in 1833, he sent a letter to the American Revivalist and the Rochester Observer in which he made similar promises.27 Only four years later, however, he carefully repositioned the Second Coming at a comfortable distance in the future,28 a consequence, in part, of his failure to retake Jackson County, the Mormon New Jerusalem, from the local “infidel” population.29 In 1835, at a meeting of his newly ordained twelve apostles, he stated, “even fifty-six years should wind up the scene.”30 In a 1843 revelation, the Deity promised that if Smith lived to see his eighty-fifth birthday, he would see the “face of the Son of Man.”31 With this new light, Smith became increasingly scornful of William Miller’s eagerness to hasten the coming of the Lord, declaring in 1844 that “Christ will not come this year, as Father Miller has prophesied,” nor “in forty years.”32 When Smith died at just forty himself, all bets were off. In which camp Mormonism falls within the wide array of Christian beliefs regarding the earthly kingdom of Christ and thousand years of peace, the Millennium, is not a difficult question—though one would not think so given the lack of consensus in the scholarly literature. Learned Mormon opinion has vac-

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illated back and forth between the two great eschatological poles in Christian thought, premillennialism (the belief in the literal second coming of Jesus Christ as an apocalyptic event that ushers in the millennium) and postmillennialism (the belief in the transformation of the world into a millennial Christian utopia before his arrival), attempting to harmonize Mormonism’s premillennialist theology of saints literally caught up in the clouds to meet Jesus when he comes again with its seemingly postmillennialist, political-kingdom-of-God idea—a new world order or theocracy of the saints’ making, not God’s, that ushers in the Second Coming of the Messiah. Although opinions vary, theological-driven formulations that argue in favor of a Mormon-premillennialist nexus and those of a more historical nature that see in Mormonism something akin to the Evangelical Protestant or postmillennialist belief in the perfection of the world gradually in the here and now, knowingly or not, both proffer an orthodox Christian interpretation. They disagree only on which half of Christian orthodoxy Mormonism mimics. Those who suggest a combination are, in fact, the most Christian in their outlook, whereas those who proffer a more one-sided and dogmatic premillennialism as the basis for Mormon eschatology, without intending to, greatly undermine all such apologies for the faith in relation to an alleged theological congruity with primitive Christianity. The recent suggestion that the political kingdom was never more than a metaphor is suspiciously like the Augustinian City of God, although Mormonism, like early Christianity, might be said to have backed down in the face of vandals of a kind, toning down the rhetoric or else. A rudimentary understanding of Christian eschatology is all that is required to resolve much of the confusion. For starters, the orthodox Christian position (Catholic and Protestant) is not an either-or proposition but rather a double helix; to rip its two strands apart is to invite trouble. Historically, premillennialism—the belief in a literal (political) kingdom of God on earth—has been attacked as a Judaization of Christianity. Premillennialism is a scion of Jewish apocalypticism. Here is the problem, and here is the means of solving it. The Mormon political kingdom of God—a literal and premillennial world government—and the religion’s predilection for premillennialism fit hand in glove. Next, we require a more precise determination with regard to the several premillennialisms out there. Dispensationalism (the belief in the secret rapture of the Saints before the public premillennial appearance of Jesus in glory) is the best candidate but does not quite suffice in the end, because Mormon eschatology arises out of a Judaic eschatology, but as act one of a two-act play. In its final definitive scene, Mormonism expounds a Hebraic-Christian eschatology

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along British Israelite lines (the belief in the failure of the Jews to live up to the covenant and thus that Israel’s alleged British progeny are the true sons and daughters of God) that opens the door to anti-Semitism despite professions of love and respect for Israel. At the same time, early Mormonism’s tendency to live and let live keeps it from falling into a vitriolic anti-Semitism, dividing the world equally between America (the New Jerusalem and homeland of the children of Israel) and Palestine (the homeland of the children of Judah). Early Mormonism clearly falls on the side of Christianity’s eschatological troublemakers. In theory, then, the Mormon political kingdom of God conforms with what Hansen has said: an earthly institution with a very literal geopolitical agenda. Ironically, Hansen proffers a synthesis of postmillennialism and premillennialism as the basis for the political kingdom, weakening his case slightly (from a purely theological standpoint), since the latter favors the idea of heaven on earth even more than the former.33 The wide support for early Mormon eschatology as a combination of pre- and postmillennialism suggests that attention to theological detail has not been the first priority for other historians, either—though perhaps this has caused no great harm, in the final analysis. Ernest Lee Tuveson, for example, argues that Mormon speculation regarding the end time did not choose between the two.34 In concert with Tuveson, Richard T. Hughes writes: “The fundamental question regarding Latter-day Saints, therefore, has to do with the relation between the pessimistic, regressive strands of Mormon thought, on the one hand [consistent with premillennialism], and the optimistic, progressive strands of Mormon thought on the other [consistent with postmillennialism].”35 David Smith suggests it was more of an “eccentric embodiment” of the “postmillennial idea.”36 Timothy Smith, in concert with Hansen, puts more stock in what Mormons did as opposed to what they said. “Though premillennialists,” Smith writes, Mormons “must prepare the way of the Lord by uniting under his kingship now and accepting all the commands which came from the mouth of his prophet. They thus laid upon themselves the responsibility to hasten the millennium, much as the main body of American and English evangelicals called postmillennialists had accepted responsibility to prepare a kingdom for the King.”37 Keith E. Norman espouses the Hansenean view, too.38 Underwood, defender of the only truly doctrinaire premillennialist interpretation in his seminal The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, purports to wipe the slate clean, as the resident theological headmaster of the Mormon History Association. He objects to the postmillennialist label, especially when one considers (in large part thanks to his meticulous scholarship) that early Mormons

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categorically rejected the postmillennialist vision of mainstream Evangelicals.39 Accordingly, “Mormons should not be placed within the reformist tradition since it was antithetical to their basic theology.”40 “Against the backdrop of nearly two thousand years of eschatological thought,” he further argues, “Mormon teachings fall clearly and consistently on the apocalyptic end of the spectrum, however labeled.”41 A link with conservative Protestants, who, as Ernest Sandeen points out, were biblical literalists and premillennialists, is implied.42 Yet Mormonism, in Underwood’s view, is a unique species of classical Christianity and orthodox Protestantism. My own meager contribution to this question does not add very much to what Underwood says, offering a slight correction at best to his nuanced discussion of early Mormon theology. I will belabor the point only to suggest that in addition to his all-too-diplomatic exclusion of such radical millenarians as the Dispensationalists (who have something to contribute to the discussion), he does not go outside the rather narrow possibilities of antebellum conservative Christianity.43 That said, if Protestant heresy is our only guide, then it seems that Mormon eschatology has most in common with the branch of Protestant apocalyptic known as Futurism and/or Dispensationalism, the brainchild of Edward Irving and John Nelson Darby, in particular. Underwood admits, for example, that a significant number of British and Canadian converts to Mormonism were Irvingites or sympathetic to Dispensationalist teaching.44 Joseph Fielding and John Taylor (the latter going on to became president of the LDS wing of the church) espoused Futurist or Dispensationalist ideas before and after joining. Mormons and Irvingites (the latter among the best known of the Dispensationalists) were often confused; in fact, Joseph Smith accused them of counterfeiting the truth (p. 134).45 But what does this add to our understanding of early Mormonism’s relationship to the Evangelical standing order, other than the fact that some contemporary source seems a more likely antecedent? Not unlike the way the Book of Mormon might be said to borrow from Swedenborg and yet take the discussion beyond to some anti-Swedenborgian position, so, too, Dispensationalism might be said to represent the basis for an idea that transcends itself. Dispensationalism can be seen as an attempt to balance Jewish and Christian, literal and spiritual, as part of an effort to harmonize premillennialism and postmillennialism. One begins to see why some might have confused Mormons and Irvingites. The two agree on many points of doctrine, but such homology is a convergence of means only, the same set of biblical-literalist tropes employed to very different ends. This becomes quite clear when one

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compares their respective views on the future of the Jews (I will come back to this). Smith was perhaps not being overly defensive when he objected to comparisons between his movement and the Irvingites. Although he shared their view that God’s covenant people had a role to play in the unfolding millennial kingdom, Dispensationalists gave Judaism too much. This ran afoul of Smith’s larger Templar agenda, which forgave but did not forget the crucifixion of the Lord at Jewish-Roman hands. The seat of political power and priesthood authority during the millennium would thus be located in the New World rather than in the Old, the posterity of Joseph (the Hebrew descendants of Ephraim and alleged progenitors of the Gentiles), not Judah, God’s chosen people. Perhaps Smith’s premillennialism came from sources closer to home that were not so anti-Semitic and thus presumably more to his liking. Congregationalist minister Joshua Spaulding of Salem had something to say on the matter of biblical prophecy and the Jewish people. Smith convalesced after his operation at the home of an uncle who resided in Salem; perhaps he became acquainted with Spaulding’s thought at that time. Sentiments Concerning the Coming and Kingdom of Christ was widely known, in any event. Ethan Smith, author of View of the Hebrews, thought to have been the inspiration for Joseph Smith’s ideas concerning the Hebraic origin of the Indians, published a book on biblical prophecy, entitled A Key to the Figurative Language Found in the Sacred Scriptures, of which the Mormon prophet may have been aware.46 Smith’s apocalypticism might just as easily be seen as Masonic speculation, however. Webb’s Masonic bookstore in Albany, New York, trafficked in Masonic-driven apocalyptic works. He published Richard Brother’s Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times in 1796. His business partner, J. Bicheno, published a prophetic work, The Signs of the Times,47 just when Webb was putting the finishing touches on his Freemason’s Monitor. Indeed, some of the apocalyptic ideas in Bicheno’s book found their way into Webb’s monitor. Who are the apocalyptic Masons? They are the Order of the Temple, Knights of the East and West, Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, and a host of other “plagiarisms,” according to Waite, of the Rose-Croix of Herendom— types of Templars, one and all, for which the Apocalypse figures prominently, as do the Second Coming, Resurrection, and millennium.48 “The Apocalypse is to those who receive the nineteenth Degree [or Grand Pontiff],” Pike explains, “the Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and despises all the pomp and works of Lucifer.” It is surely not difficult to see why Scottish Rite Masons, in particular, might be attracted to the Book of Revelation, “a

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book,” Pike continues, “as obscure as the Sohar.”49 Templars, having failed to liberate Jerusalem, quite naturally pine for the day when it shall be rebuilt—by them, under the banner of a Christian republic. Ultimately, Mormonism’s apocalyptic lineage is pro-Masonic rather than anti-Christian because it claims that “Jews” are not “Hebrews” for the same reasons the British Israelites do. And so who are they? Suffice it to say that not all British Israelites are Masons, but most of if not all Masons tend to be British Israelites—pro-Jewish and yet deeply anti-Semitic. This goes well beyond the irony of the Jewishness of Jesus for Christians, as we will see.

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thirteen mormons and jews

But the Devil had influence among the Jews after all the great things they had witnessed to cause the death of Jesus Christ by hanging him between heaven and earth. —Joseph Smith Jr.

    defends the literal return of Israel to its homeland in Palestine in preparation for the long-awaited millennium and alleged Hebraic hegemony. Nephi says, “The Father shall commence, in preparing the way for the fulfilling of his covenants, which he hath made to his people, which are of the House of Israel.”1 The prophecies of Isaiah have yet to be fulfilled. “And behold, according to the words of the prophet, the Messiah will set himself again the second time, to recover them” (p. 75). The “Gentiles” are the primary agents in the literal return of the Jews to their homeland, “carrying them forth to the lands of their inheritance” (p. 84; see also pp. 97, 98). The return of Palestine to the Jews was defended by such celebrated early Mormons as Heber C. Kimball, Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, and Erastus Snow.2 Commenting on Isaiah 11:11, also quoted in the Book of Mormon, Smith writes:

T

The Time has at last arrived, when the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has set his hand again the second time to recover the remnants of his people . . . to bring in the fullness of the Gentiles, and establish that covenant with them, which was promised when their sins should be taken away. . . . This covenant has never been established with the house of Israel, nor with the house of Judah. . . . Christ, in the days of his flesh, proposed to make a covenant with them, but they rejected Him and His

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proposals, and in consequence thereof, they were broken off, and no covenant was made with them at that time. But their unbelief has not rendered the promise of God of none effect; no, for there was another day limited [sic] in David . . . when his people, Israel should be a willing people.3

This is not carte blanche, but it is pretty forgiving. As noted, however, it is possible to be both pro-Hebrew and anti-Jewish. Here’s the rub. Lehi, for example, descends from Joseph, not Judah, as does Smith. Mormonism does not simply fall prey to the anti-Semitism inherent to Christianity. As Paul Tillich has said, one cannot be a Christian without being anti-Semitic. (One does not easily forgive fratricide, especially against one so beloved, so important, so unjustly condemned to torture and death.) Yet the Book of Mormon can be seen as a most virulent strain of Christian anti-Semitism. “Christ,” Nephi explains, using very strong language, “should come among the Jews, among they which are the more wicked part of the world; and they shall crucify him: For thus it behooveth our God; and there is none other nation on earth that would crucify their God.” Nephi goes on to explain, “Wherefore, because of their iniquities, destructions, famines, pestilences and bloodsheds, shall come upon them; and they which shall not be destroyed, shall be scattered among all nations.” Gentiles persecute Jews as part of the divine plan of redemption.4 Although Dispensationalists are notorious for their role in the distribution of anti-Semitic literature (lobbying and raising money to support the state of Israel all the while),5 theoretically at least they defer to Judaism once the millennium actually arrives. Darby was acutely aware of the Jewishness of Jesus and the covenant God made with Abraham. Jesus, he taught, would rule the earth during the millennium from his capital in Jerusalem. His top advisers would be Jewish, Gentiles occupying the lower echelon of the new world government. Darby’s millennium was a Semitic affair. As scholar Herman A. Hoyt explains, “the most reasonable explanation recognizes the existence of two kingdoms,”6 what Darby called the “universal kingdom of God” of Psalms 103:19 and the “mediatorial kingdom of Israel” of Daniel 2:44 (cited on pp. 73–74). Plenty of early Mormon testimony speaks of two millennial capitals. Sidney Rigdon, an early adviser to Smith, believed that the “ancient saints will reign with Christ a thousand years; the gathered saints will dwell under that reign.”7 The phrase “ancient saints” is undoubtedly a reference to Israel, but the

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“gathered saints” quite probably refers to the children of Judah and other lesser “Hebrews.” Here, then, is the difference between the Mormon millennium and that of the Dispensationalists. The tenth article of faith in Mormonism (there are thirteen in all) states: “We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion will be built upon this [the American] continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory.” Here the words “this continent” ring out loud and clear as a correction to the philoSemitism inherent in Dispensationalism. Orson Pratt, in his famous 1849 millenarian treatise The New Jerusalem: or, the Fulfilment of Ancient Prophecy underscores the preeminence of Zion.8 As it says in Ether, Behold, Ether saw the days of Christ, and he spake concerning the New Jerusalem upon this land; and he spake also concerning the house of Israel, and the Jerusalem from whence Lehi should come; and after that it should be destroyed it should be built up again a holy city unto the Lord; wherefore it could not be a New Jerusalem . . . wherefore the remnant of the house of Joseph shall be built upon this land; and it shall be a land of their inheritance; and they shall build up a holy city unto the Lord, like unto Jerusalem of old; and they shall no more be confounded, until the end come, when the earth shall pass away. . . . And then cometh the New Jerusalem. . . . And then also cometh the Jerusalem of old.9

That the children of Joseph are “no more being confounded” alludes, of course, to the confusion at the Tower of Babel. The New Jerusalem is not the wicked city Lehi and his family were forced to flee, inhabited by the children of Judah. In the Mormon millennial pecking order, the Jewish people get their old city back, but it falls under the watchful eye of a new religious capital far away on another continent, the domain of eleven of the original twelve tribes of Israel. Whether Jesus reigns in Jerusalem or simply rules over it from Zion is not clear—a moot point in some respects. Stephen Epperson, in his book Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel, suggests that Mormonism was “an independent Christian theology of Israel which affirmed the autonomy, integrity, and continuity of covenant Israel.”10 Autonomy and integrity perhaps, but not quite an affirmation of the continuity of the Jews’ special status as God’s chosen people. This is because, according to British Israelites, Jews (not Hebrews per se) sold their birthright

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when they crucified Jesus. (The Romans, it seems, get relatively unbruised.) One may consider what Brigham Young said before a packed house of Saints on the matter of the salvation of the Jews: Can you make a Christian of a Jew? I tell you, nay. If a Jew comes into this Church and honestly professes to be a Saint, a follower of Christ, and if the blood of Judah is in his veins, he will apostatize. . . . You may as well undertake to command the most degraded of these Indian tribes, and give them arms and accouterments, and try to put them through the regular military exercise, as to preach to the Jews to make them believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Jerusalem is not to be redeemed by the soft still voice of the preacher of the Gospel of peace. Why? Because they were once the blessed of the Lord, the chosen of the Lord, the promised seed. They were the people from whom should spring the Messiah; and salvation could be found only through that tribe. The Messiah came through them, and they killed him. . . . You may hand out to them gold, you may feed and clothe them, but it is impossible to convert the Jews, until the Lord God Almighty does it. . . . Then I say to the Elders in those regions . . . LEAVE THEM, AND COME HOME, THE LORD DOES NOT REQUIRE YOU TO STAY THERE, FOR THEY MUST SUFFER AND BE DAMNED.11

In the mid-1870s Orson Pratt defended the church’s policy of some forty-two years of not proselyting Jews.12 Mormonism’s relationship to Judaism can be seen as a love-hate affair. This is because it distinguishes between the House of Judah and the House of Israel. Jews might be Israelites, but Israelites are not Jewish. And so it loves Israel and hates Judah. Such a fine point is the sine qua non of British Israelism, too, as I have said—a racist ideology that is not only deeply anti-Semitic but cousin of the lost ten tribes theory (the belief that the ten northern tribes the Assyrians carried away into captivity were the forefathers of British Europeans and Native Americans). Not too surprisingly, card-carrying British Israelites were among Mormonism’s first converts in England. Both claim literal descent from ancient Israel, from the lost ten tribes in particular.13 Both also believe that through them Judah will be redeemed.14 (That many on the political fringe in American society, famous for their virulent anti-Semitism, espouse British Israelite beliefs merely drives home the point.)15 The notion that the covenant passed from Judah to Israel is at the heart of this anti-Semitic polemic. (It is important to remember, however, that Mormons have never been party—their

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  Masonic Model of the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:102a.

British Israelite beliefs notwithstanding—to any form of militant anti-Semitism or vigilante persecution of people of Jewish descent.) The restoration of Israel in Mormon thought concerns the redemption of an idea more so than of a people, a deep reverence for the immutability of God’s Word rather than a sincere interest in the fate of “the most wicked in all the world.” An attachment to the Holy Land and its place in history eclipsed any genuine interest in the ultimate fate of these covenant people. Even Judaism’s most daring Mormon acolyte, the eminent missionary to the Holy Land Orson Hyde, dedicated the Holy Land, not its Jewish inhabitants, to the preaching of the gospel.16 We perhaps should not be overly surprised to find that the book’s olive branch to the Indians (the Lamanites), if seen in the same Masonic/British-Israelite light, also proves less than forgiving. One prominent Mormon scholar has argued that “nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints (as they came to be called) embarked on a path that led to de-

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velopments that now distinguish their tradition from the Christian tradition as surely as early Christianity was distinguished from its Hebraic context.”17 A slight correction seems in order: rather than a linear, teleological movement out of and then away from orthodox Christianity, early Mormonism can be seen in some respects as a neo-Hebraic countermovement, not unlike Rabbinic Judaism, since it, too, defined itself in opposition to Primitive Christianity, coming into being for that expressed and exclusive purpose.18 At the same time, Mormonism went well beyond mere Judaic apocalyptic retrenchment or millenarian literalism, constituting a modern-day liberation of America the New Jerusalem by an encampment of Christian Masons/Templar Knights. Judaism could have Jerusalem. America was Zion.

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the curse and redemption of the lamanites: salvation bi-race alone “Are the Mormons abolitionists?” No, unless delivering the people from priestcraft, and the priests from the power of Satan, should be considered abolition. But we do not believe in setting the negroes free. . . . “Do they [Mormons] stir up the Indians to war, and to commit depredations?” No. —Joseph Smith Jr. Civilization is simply the spirit of improvement, in learning and civil matters. . . . These natives belong to the house of Israel . . . but through their forefathers transgressed the law of God . . . until the whole race has sunk deep into barbarism. . . . The Lord has taken from this race any disposition for improvement even to this day. —Brigham Young

   (1978), the LDS Church refused to ordain men of African lineage to the Mormon priesthood. The priesthood includes the offices (degrees, in effect) of deacon, teacher, and priest (the lesser, or Aaronic, priesthood) and elder, seventy, and high priest (the higher, or Melchizedek, priesthood). These standard-issue and exclusively male appointments are essentially administrative. More problematic by far is the fact that the priesthood ban kept African men and women from going through the temple and being sealed as husband and wife for time and all eternity (the highest and most solemn of the LDS liturgical requirements). Temple marriage qualifies one for the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom in Mormon thought, and thus before 1978 only a select group of white Mormon men and women were eligible. At the same time, people of color were always welcome to enter the celestial kingdom through a backdoor of sorts— baptized into the church and unto repentance in this life—but were considered the stuff of angels, not of gods per se. In 1978, when President Spencer W. Kimball demonstrated great courage, according to some, and suspended the practices excluding African Americans, this all changed—in principle, at least. In

U

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fact, more than twenty years has passed with no great influx of people of African descent into the church or through the temple. The change in policy was due in part to the brave efforts of a coterie of Mormon intellectuals who argued that the priesthood ban had no doctrinal basis and was a custom rather than divine decree. Still, Kimball made no apologies or canonical reparations for a genealogical prejudice that had (inadvertently?) led to discrimination,1 adroitly adding blacks to the roster without giving up the major scriptural source for black inferiority in Mormonism—the Book of Abraham. Not unlike the repeal of polygamy, the suspension of the priesthood ban can be seen as a kind of necessary evil to avoid causing the church’s mission to the “Lamanites” in Latin America and the massive influx of red-black and black-red peoples into the church at that time to come to a screeching halt.2 Before becoming the church’s president, Kimball had worked tirelessly as an apostle, the “mission to the Lamanites” among his chief responsibilities and loves. The suspension of the priesthood ban, then, was a corollary of Kimball’s lifelong interest and sincere desire to revitalize the Mormon mission to native peoples as outlined in the Book of Mormon, not an attempt to initiate a Mormon-led reclamation of the inhabitants of Africa and their descendants for its own sake. Mormon historians more or less agree that such discriminatory practices contravened the spirit of the Book of Mormon. As Newell G. Bringhurst explains in his seminal Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, “Mormon racist concepts as articulated in the Books of Moses and Abraham represent a ‘harder’ Mormon line against blacks than that earlier assumed toward the Indians in the Book of Mormon.”3 Whether the Book of Mormon discussion of the redemption of the Lamanites has anything to do with or say about the so-called Negro question is in some respects the issue. Indeed, some African-American converts to Mormonism, as Jessie Embry points out, take exception to the curse of the Lamanites, seeing in it a covert antiblack statement.4 Mormons of native descent object to being called Lamanites for perhaps the same reason.5 Elder George P. Lee, the first Native American General Authority in the Mormon church, was excommunicated for heresy when he attempted to turn the Book of Mormon on its head and suggest that red, not white, was the Deity’s color of choice— the implication being that Mormonism had been co-opted by Caucasians. The Reverend Diedrich Willers of the German Reformed Church was among the first to detect a hidden anti-African agenda in the Book of Mormon, in part because of its many allusions to the biblical proslavery argument (the story in Genesis 9:21–27 where Noah, “after sleeping off a drunken stupor, placed a

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‘curse’ on his grandson Canaan.”6 Indeed, Willers concluded that the Book of Mormon was a thinly veiled discussion of the origin of blacks.7 The Lord instructs Nephi, for example, that should Laman and Lemuel, his older brothers, rebel against him, he “will curse them even with a sore curse, and they shall have no power over [his] seed.”8 Later, “the Lord God did cause a skin of darkness to come upon them.” “Cursed”—appearing, in all its forms, eighty-one times—and “mark”—which appears eleven times—allude to verses 11 and 15 of Genesis 4: “And now are thou cursed . . . and the LORD set a mark upon Cain.” Nephites who “mix with the Lamanites” are said to become “wicked, and wild, and ferocious” (p. 413). The red-black race of Amlicites in the Book of Mormon is a case in point. “Amlicites,” the book says, “were distinguished from the Nephites, for they had marked themselves with red . . . after the manner of the Lamanites. . . . And it came to pass that whosoever did mingle his seed with that of the Lamanites, did bring the same curse upon his seed.” Dark skin is the certain fate of all whites in the narrative who “suffer [themselves] to be led away by the Lamanites” (p. 228). The first such cursing and/or marking—that of Nephi’s wicked brothers and their posterity—consists of a black skin, moreover. The Book of Mormon is quite clear about this, too. “And behold, they were cut off from his presence. And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint,” Nephi explains, “wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, therefore the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them” (p. 73). Willers’s contention that a virulent anti-Africanism colored the Book of Mormon discussion of Indian origins—so much so that black and red are indistinguishable in the text—jibes with the findings of a recent linguistic-historical study. In his book Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, Jack D. Forbes points out that whites have tended to presume that red-black and black-red peoples (largely because of their color) are shades of black and thus African at bottom.9 White-black and black-white fall prey to the same color prejudice, especially in the United States, where the belief has always been strong that a single drop of African blood is all it takes to render one a direct descendant of the biblical Canaan (p. 261). Like many at the time, Smith believed strongly in the biblical-literalist defense of slavery.10 Abolitionists, in his opinion, were guilty of attempting to halt a scheme that had the blessing of heaven. The gospel, as Paul preached it, only promised spiritual liberation. To enjoin slaves to leave their masters

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was thus a distortion.11 In 1835 he issued a public statement in defense of black servitude: We believe it just to preach the gospel to the nations of the earth and warn the righteous to save themselves from the corruptions of the world; but we do not believe it right to interfere with bondage of servants neither preach the gospel to, nor baptize them, contrary to the will and wish of their masters, nor to meddle with or influence them in the least to be dissatisfied with their situations in this life thereby jeopardizing the lives of men. Such interference we believe to be unlawful and dangerous to the peace of every government allowing human beings to be held in servitude.12

Likewise in 1838, in response to the question “Are the Mormons abolitionists?” Smith responded to the contrary.13 He attacked abolitionism as the work of a “hireling pseudo priesthood,”14 proffering a colonization scheme, instead.15 His followers took it for granted that the Book of Mormon reflected similar views. Parley P. Pratt, an early disciple of Mormonism, defended Smith’s translation of a set of metal plates from Kinderhook, Ohio (a hoax it turns out),16 allegedly “filled with engravings in Egyptian language and”—of importance to this discussion—“the genealogy of one of the ancient Jaredites back to Ham the son of Noah.”17 The apostate priesthood makes the journey to America by Jaredite ark. This much is clear. Implicit is the notion that the seed of Canaan either stowed away in a cargo bay or, more likely, on the arm of some unsuspecting or recalcitrant Jaredite husband. With so many parallels to the Noachian story, that the seed of Africa or apostate priesthood (they are one and the same, it seems) boards yet another ark (through the bonds of holy matrimony, perhaps) might go without saying. This, at least, is consistent with the Mormon belief in the African ancestry of Ham’s wife, that “the curse of Canaan” was, in effect, more biological than supernatural in origin—dark skin the punishment for marrying outside the race, the children taking on the hue of the apostate priesthood.18 Likewise, “the curse of Cain” is blamed on a “Satan-worshiping wife” of foreign ancestry.19 Although Mormons toe the monogenetic line, rejecting out of hand the polygenetic theory of the pre-Adamite races (black, brown, red, and yellow), there is an unavoidable latent polygenesis with regard to Cain’s wife. Sanford Porter, an early convert to Mormonism, thought she must have been of pre-Adamite stock (black, in other words): “I have read some in the Qeoran [sic], the mahometan [sic] bible, that gives an account of nations of people, that

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dwelt on earth, three thousand years before adam [sic]. . . . It may be so, it [does not contradict] what is written in the bible. Cain, after he slew his brother[,] flew from his father, and mother to a distant land [where] it seems he found some nation, of people, for himself a wife.”20 Cain’s first mistake, it seems, was not the murder of Abel but falling in with the wrong crowd—a band of murderers who get their hooks into him with the considerable help of a (beautiful?) woman. Smith’s Inspired Version (the first chapters published separately as the Book of Moses) contradicts Porter. Cain’s wife is said to be the daughter of one of his brethren (Gen. 5:12). At the same time, she is a lover of Satan (Gen. 5:13). Cain gives himself to a woman before giving himself to Satan. Cain’s pact with the devil in Smith’s Inspired Version is a Masonic raising: “And Satan said unto Cain, Swear unto me by thy throat, and if thou tell it thou shalt die; and swear thy brethren by their heads, and by the living God, that they tell it not; for if they tell it; for if they tell it they shall surely die. . . . And all these things were done in secret. And Cain said, Truly I am Mahan, the master of this great secret, that I may murder and get gain. Wherefore Cain was called Master Mahan” (Gen. 5:14–16). Only afterward does Cain murder Abel. In fact, the murder of Abel is patterned after the murder of Hiram Abiff. Cain, we are told, “was shut out from the presence of the Lord” (Gen. 5:26), and it is not until he removes himself “east of Eden” (Africa) that he “knows” his wife and they conceive a son. “For, from the days of Cain,” it says, “there was a secret combination, and their works were in the dark, and they knew every man his brother” (Gen. 5:37). These passages in the Inspired Version (coming on the heels of the Book of Mormon) offer a rare glimpse into the mind of Smith on the Morgan slaying. Terming Cain “Master Mahan” (Master Mason) can be seen as a none-too-subtle jab at the Masons of Smith’s day. An apocryphal story of the elevation of Lamech to “Master Mahan” and the murder of Irad (a brother) at his hand for revealing the secrets of the society to “the sons of Adam” seems all too Morganesque to be mere coincidence. “And Irad, the son of Enoch [Cain’s firstborn], having known their secret, began to reveal it unto the sons of Adam; wherefore. Lamech, being angry, slew him, not like unto Cain his brother Abel for the sake of getting gain; but he slew him for the oath’s sake” (Gen. 5:36). What is more, the Masonry to which Lamech is party does not involve women of questionable virtue since “the secrets of the society” are exclusively the domain of males. Lamech does confide in his wives about his role in the murder of Irad, but they are not privy to the secret pact with Satan that, the text says,

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“began to spread among all the sons of men. And it was among the sons of men. Among the daughters of men, these things were not spoken” (Gen. 5:39–40). One detects a hint of anti-Evangelical polemic, too, when it says that Lamech’s wives “rebelled against him, and declared these things abroad and had not compassion” (Gen. 5:40). In the chapter that follows, Adam knows Eve, and she gives birth to Seth, “another seed instead of Abel whom Cain slew” (Gen. 6:3) and thus the one and only conduit of the true and everlasting priesthood. A book of remembrance is kept (the lost book?), written in a language that is “pure and undefiled” and containing, among its many inspired passages, a genealogical record of a “pure and undefiled” priesthood line reaching back to Adam. The story of the descendants of Cain and Seth in the Inspired Version accords with the Book of Mormon pattern of protracted race war ending in genocide for the white, or Adamic, faction. More important, Chapter 7 of Smith’s Book of Genesis contains a number of important clues to his understanding of the curse of Canaan myth in relation to Enoch’s vision of the “people of Cainan.” Purposively ambiguous, Cainan can be seen as a clever pun (the sort of phonetic double entendre the Mormon prophet loved to read far too much into), a conflation of the mark of Cain and curse of Canaan. In other words, the curse of Canaan reaches all the way back to Cain, the first apostate Master Mason, whose raising was presided over by the blackest of black Grand Masters, Satan himself. However, the land is cursed by the Deity following the extermination of the “people of Shum” by the Cainanites, and so the Lord “curse[d] the land with much heat . . . and a blackness came upon all the children of Cainan, that they were despised among all the people” (Gen. 7:9–10). Enoch is told to preach repentance, but not to the people of Cainan. On first reading, this clearly supports the thesis that the curse of the Lamanites falls squarely on the side of environmentalism, or monogenesis, the whelp of rank antebellum speculation of the best-intentioned anthropological and philo-Semitic kind: the theory of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians. In fact, Enoch’s vision of the extermination of the Shumites in Smith’s Inspired Version can be seen as a thinly veiled allusion to the people of Zeniff in the Book of Mormon, which begins with an invasion of dark peoples from the north against the light-skinned Nephites: And it came to pass that king Laman died, and his son began to reign in his stead. And he began to stir his people up in rebellion against my people; therefore, they began to prepare for war, and to come up to battle against my people.—But I hav-

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ing sent my spies out round about the land of Shemlon, that I might discover their preparations, that I might guard against them, that they might not come upon my people and destroy them. And it came to pass that they came up upon the north of the land of Shilom, with their numerous hosts.21

The Book of Mormon and Inspired Version, if taken together, suggest that Smith clearly assumed that environment (climate) was a factor in the metamorphosis from white to black—from Adamite to Cainite and from Nephite to Lamanite. However, because the Deity curses the land with a scorching heat, which in turn causes the skin of unrighteous men and women to turn black, forcing them underground and indenturing them to their surroundings, a degree of supernaturalism is also involved. This may explain why the early Mormon missionary to Palestine, Orson Hyde, dedicated the Holy land but not its erstwhile chosen people to the restored gospel. Are we to infer that the early Mormon resistance to proselyting Jews had something to do with them being seen as adopted sons and daughters of Cain? If so, then perhaps the news is not entirely bad, for like unto the Lamanites, they, too, are offered a last chance to return to their former priesthood and thus racial glory, to become as it were a “white and delightsome” people as a result of changes in temperament and temperature. Indeed, the early Mormon mission to the Lamanites and its latent environmentalism might be said to have a ripple effect.22 The best work on the subject is still Dan Vogel’s 1986 book, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon, taking its cue from a host of controversial writings, early Mormon apostle and apologist B. H. Roberts’ Studies of the Book of Mormon among them.23 Roberts asks the question whether “an investigator of the Book of Mormon be much blamed if he were to decide that Ethan Smith’s book with its suggestion as to the division of his Israelites into two peoples . . . and of the savages overcoming the civilized division led to the fashioning of chiefly those same things in the Book of Mormon?”24 Vogel is similarly interested in whether Joseph Smith was influenced by Ethan Smith, Solomon Spaulding, and a host of others who spun similar yarns in the years leading up to the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830. And although Vogel’s discussion adds significantly to our understanding of the contemporary possibilities, after taking pains not to be accused of reductionism, the discussion ends there.25 The Book of Mormon can be seen as a variation on a (revisionist Hebrew) theme. But this view fails to take into account how Smith’s writing sheds light on his cultural environs, too. One is reminded, for example, of a new trend in

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Jewish studies that proffers the New Testament as a primary source for the study of the Mishnah and Talmud since chronologically, at least, this makes a good deal of sense—more so than liberal Christians’ use of Jewish writings in the exegesis of the Christian scriptures. Moreover, as Alan Segal has shown,26 Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism can be seen as inextricably connected, responding to a similar set of social and cultural issues, arriving at profoundly different conclusions but not independent of one another. Similarly, a discussion of the Book of Mormon’s spin on the Hebraic origin of the American Indians can benefit from an approach that allows for both continuity and disparity. There are elements of both monogenesis and a soft polygenesis in the Book of Mormon, environmentalism and supernaturalism, the myth of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians and British Israelism, with generous sprinklings of both the curse of Canaan and mark of Cain. The Book of Mormon’s peculiar spin on the Hebraic origin of the American Indians has a Masonic and/or British Israelite slant. This may explain why it takes pains to distinguish between its peoples and the ten lost tribes—who, it seems, are truly lost to all but the Father and Son. British Israelism traces its intellectual origins to the British nationalist Richard Brothers (1757–1824). Brothers theorized that the ten tribes of Israel migrated to England to escape Assyrian and Babylonian aggression, a school of thought with a significant following in both England and the United States as early as 1800.27 It has been accused of fostering what Hebrew scholar N. H. Parker called a “narrow nationalism and narrower Christianity” (p. ix). This would not be an unfair assessment of the Book of Mormon. William Carpenter, writing in The Freemason, explains that Freemasons are direct descendants of Joseph through the loins of Ephraim, “messengers or missionaries of God’s grace and mercy to mankind, through whom Judah is to be regenerated and restored, and the fulness of the Gentiles to be brought in.”28 The foundations of Freemasonry are said to be “laid in JUDAISM—using this word in its widest sense, as equivalent to ISRAELITISM” (p. 1). British and American Freemasons, he writes, form “part of that race which is to be employed by the Almighty in turning men from darkness to light” (p. 193; emphasis mine). And yet British Israelism is also the inspiration behind the violent Christian Identity Movement and other rabid, anti-Semitic groups that claim the Jews, through intermarriage, gave up their claim to the Abrahamic covenant. Similarly, the Book of Mormon adopts Gentiles into the house of Israel and through them promises to turn darkness to light (Smith is identified as a direct descendant of Joseph through the loins of Ephraim and thus a conduit of Masonic light).29

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Quaint though the Hebrew argument may be, such theorizing was nonetheless respected, the American Indians “widely regarded as having descended from the House of Israel, specifically through the Lost Ten Tribes.”30 Notably, the modern view—that the native inhabitants of the Americas crossed the Bering Strait over a land bridge—predominated in academic circles then as now.31 Still, the notion of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians had its charm, though it did not extend to America’s other Americans.32 Josiah Priest was another antebellum New Yorker to characterize Indians as Hebrews in deerskin robes. Africans were another matter, the “cursed” offspring of Ham and Canaan—red a by-product of climate and black the handiwork of the Deity.33 Of course, environmentalism hardly escaped the orbit of antebellum prejudice against natives. The noble savage was half savage, and if a child of God, then still a child, to be trained up in the way of civilization or else. As Horace Bushnell would later write in a work whose title comes rather too close to the truth as whites conceived it then (Nature and the Supernatural, as Together Constituting One System of God), “savages were beings, or races physiologically run down, or become effete, under sin.”34 Nature was seen by many as the agent of God’s wrath and thus climate more of a rubber stamp than a prime mover in the divine economy. Smith’s discussion of the “people of Cainan” in his Inspired Version falls into this category: a savagely hot climate causes their skin to turn black, which in turn forces them to keep to themselves, to descend further into savagery until they are the scourge of civilization. What the Hebraic origin of the American Indians gave with one hand it took away with the other. As Robert F. Berkhofer explains, Indians were now simply “corrupt copies of the Jewish or other high civilizations of the past or, at worst, the very agents of Satan’s own degeneracy.”35 In some important respects, such theorizing implied that natives were damaged goods, and this was all the more reason to let nature run its course. The sooner the better, too, for whites might be enticed to go over to the dark side—literally—giving in to their latent animal instincts. Roy Harvey Pearce suggests that the average American white male at the time “hated himself for his yearning. He was tempted, we might say; and he felt driven to destroy the temptation and likewise the tempters. He pitied the tempters, because in his yearning for a simpler life, he could identify with them. He censured them, because he was ashamed to be tempted, and he refused to deny his higher nature.”36 Popular literature played along, disseminating two competing stereotypes: native as nobleman and as subhuman. This juxtaposition served several functions. Celebrating the noble savage long after the extermination of the Indians bordered on tokenism,

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whereas vilifying natives for savage reprisals justified harsh and grievous treatment at the hands of vengeful whites. Captivity narratives underscored this, with Indian bestiality and warmongering, torture as communal spectacle, and cannibalism common themes in such lurid depictions of native culture. Mass exterminations, rape, human sacrifice, and cannibalism in the Book of Mormon of both Nephites and Lamanites may indeed serve the same function, pouring cold water on the white American male libido and the accompanying incorrigible lust for women of color.37 This did not reflect a perceived need to destroy temptation of some nondescript kind—a failure to be less than honest in one’s business dealings or a penchant for the occasional drink. The average white American male does not wish simply to be freed from romantic ideas of roughing it alone in the woods. Rather, in the eyes of civilized society, at least, the issue seemed to be the removal of temptation of the interracial connubial kind. The story of the daughters of the Lamanites and the priests of wicked King Noah is a case in point: Now there was a place in Shemlon, where the daughters of the Lamanites did gather themselves together to sing, and to dance, and to make themselves merry. And it came to pass that there was one day a small number of them gathered together to sing and to dance. And now the priests of Noah . . . having tarried in the wilderness, and having discovered the daughters of the Lamanites, they laid and watched them; and when there were but few of them gathered together to dance, they came forth out of their secret places, and took them and carried them into the wilderness. (p. 196)

Their disappearance (rape) is avenged in a bloody war that ends badly for the Nephites. The sexual assault on the daughters of the Lamanites by the priests of wicked King Noah appears in the so-called Record of Zeniff, which recounts the woes of a band of Nephites who attempt to live peaceably among the Lamanites in the land of Lehi-Nephi. Zeniff has a dream that one day Nephites and Lamanites will live together in harmony. As the story unfolds, however, the Book of Mormon seems to want to suggest that Zeniff pays dearly for his credulity. The Lamanites descend upon them in droves every time any cracks appear in the Zeniffite armor, the disappearance of twenty-four young Lamanite women only the latest justification for yet another all-out Lamanite offen-

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sive. Wicked King Noah is one of those Nephite monarchs whose abuse of power flings open the gates of the city to the Lamanite hordes. And so it goes until Ammon and his brethren, emissaries of the Nephite king Mosiah, lead them out of bondage under cover of night and back to the land of Zarahemla and to freedom. Their story and the abuses of power and concomitant enslavement will cause Mosiah to usher in a reign of judges. However much this can be seen as a testament to the virtues of republican government, there is more than mere political propaganda at work here. The story of the daughters of the Lamanites and the priests of wicked King Noah leaves no doubt as to the racial nature of the original peace treaty between the people of Zeniff and the Lamanites: “And Limhi said unto him, What cause have ye to come up to war against my people? Behold my people have not broken the oath that I made unto you; wherefore why should ye break the oath which ye made to my people?” The oath the Lamanites make with the Nephites is simply to allow them to occupy the land and live their lives unmolested. In return, Nephite men promise not to molest Lamanite women: “And now the [Lamanite] king said, I have broken the oath, because thy people did carry away the daughters of my people; wherefore in my anger I did cause my people to come up to war against thy people” (p. 196). Limhi and his people pay dearly for the sexual indiscretions of their king and priestly class despite the fact that the white male rank and file had respected the ban. No matter. Indentured servitude is the logical consequence—and a curse to all when the racial mixing occurs. Mosiah’s suspension of the Nephite monarchy, then, might be said to have a hidden, segregationist (racial) agenda. Wicked King Noah and his priests tax the people grievously to support an addiction to “wives and concubines” (p. 178). The Book of Mormon, however, is of two minds where such interracial polygamous unions are concerned: “Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord . . . for there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none. . . . For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up a seed unto me, I will command my people: otherwise, they shall hearken unto these things” (p. 126). Concubinage in the Book of Mormon has an important and, in some respects, obvious racial dimension that has been overlooked. The hedonism and promiscuity of wicked King Noah and his priests serve no greater end than the satisfaction of male lust, and herein lies the problem. That the Deity reserves the right to command his priests to take wives or concubines “to raise up seed unto [him]” from time to time suggests that

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polygamy can also be seen as the engine of racial renewal, more or less as B. Carmon Hardy has shown,38 but an exclusively white male–black/red female affair—a necessary and indeed temporary measure of an interracial but assimilationist kind. Accordingly, polygamy as exclusively white on white (from the standpoint of the Book of Mormon, that is) can be seen as redundant, playing no significant role in the redemption of the Lamanites (dark peoples) and thus exemplary of what the Book of Mormon simply calls “whoredom.” Indeed, when the god of the Book of Mormon says, “For I, the Lord God, delighteth in the chastity of women,”39 this may or may not apply to women of color. (A Mormon variant of the Templar belief that Christ married Mary Magdalene, allegedly a black prostitute who bore him children of “pure blood”?) The Book of Mormon is very clear about the consequences when white husbands succumb to the temptation to cohabit with women of color for purely recreational sex. Blame for the downfall of the Nephites is laid squarely at the feet of “the men of my people.” A “sore curse, even unto destruction,” is the punishment for male lust: “I will not suffer, saith the Lord of Hosts; for they shall not lead away captive, the daughters of my people, because of their tenderness, save I shall visit them with a sore curse, even unto destruction: for they shall not commit whoredoms, like unto they of old, saith the Lord of Hosts” (p. 127). For white (Nephite) men to enjoin white (Nephite) women to have polygamous intercourse for whatever reason is strictly forbidden. Despite “the darkness of their skin,” the Lamanites are praised on occasion for not having more than one wife and marrying within their race (the two going together in the divine mind): Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate, because of their filthiness and the cursings which hath come upon their skins, are more righteous than you; for they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our fathers, that they should have, save it were one wife [of their race?]; and concubines [of other races?] should they have none; and there were no whoredoms committed among them. . . . O my brethren, I fear, that unless ye shall repent of your sins, that their skins will be whiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God. (p. 128)

  , “whiter” seems to have the sense of “purer” or “pure-blooded.” In short, endogamous polygamy and what the Nephite/Zennifite priests of wicked King Noah did is a distinction without a difference. Until the Deity says

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so, Nephite and Lamanite men and women are to be vigilant monogamists of the strict, endogamous kind. A more gender-specific analysis dramatically changes our understanding of the reason for the curse, too. Significantly, the Deity scorches the land that turns recalcitrant Adamites dark. Once the land has done its dirty work, such benighted peoples are adopted into the apostate priesthood and lineage of Cain. They become a scourge to all that is good and true, a threat to both the ecclesiastic integrity and racial purity of the people of God. However, the temptress in their midst is the thin edge of the wedge, and so a dark skin is assumed to be a bit of rather good preventive medicine sent from on high. As the Book of Mormon sees it, although pure white is as beautiful as pure black, ultimately white is beautiful and black is repellent—especially, it rather naively assumes, to the white Nephite male watching Lamanite women dance their hearts away at a distance. That the average black (Lamanite) male in the Book of Mormon seems to find any white (Nephite) female passerby completely unnerving is simply a variation on the theme perhaps best captured by D. W. Griffith in his infamous blockbuster Birth of a Nation: the specter of the black man and his unsuspecting white female victim. When the Nephites are about to be destroyed, their white women are sent to the front lines to beguile the Lamanites (sell themselves into white slavery and concubinage if necessary): Now it came to pass that the king commanded them that all the men should leave their wives and their children, and flee before Lamanites. Now there were many that would not leave them, but had rather stay and perish with them. . . . And it came to pass that those that tarried with their wives and their children, caused that their fair daughters should stand forth and plead with the Lamanites, that they should not slay them. And it came to pass that the Lamanites had compassion on them, for they were charmed with the beauty of their women; therefore the Lamanites did spare their lives, and took them captive, and carried them back to the land of Nephi, and granted unto them that they might possess the land. (pp. 194–195)

Indeed, the implication is that Lamanite women are not attractive even to Lamanite men. Nephi’s discussion of the curse supports this. A dark skin seems primarily a pox visited on Lamanite women to keep Nephite men at bay. But in the next breath the Book of Mormon seems to take it all back. A repentant albeit dark-skinned Lamanite few mix with the Nephites and become

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“white and delightsome.” The curse, in their case, is lifted. Modern editions of the Book of Mormon read “pure and delightsome” (2 Nephi 30:6), an attempt on the part of apologists to mitigate the overtly racist tone of much of the discussion. However, whether the metamorphosis from black to white also concerns white (Nephite) men and dark-skinned (Lamanite) women is the far more interesting question to ponder. The anti-Nephi Lehis—Lamanite converts to Nephite Christianity who become white—are another vantage point from which to test this. “The curse of God did no more follow them. . . . And it came to pass that those Lamanites which had united with the Nephites were numbered among the Nephites; and their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites” (p. 465). Elsewhere, following the visit of Jesus, the Book of Mormon states that “the people of Nephi did wax strong, and did multiply exceedingly fast, and became an exceedingly fair and delightsome people” (p. 515). We might infer from “multiply exceedingly fast” that the transformation was facilitated by a a brief but intense period of exogamous polygamous marriages. None of this sounds particularly amorous, either. There seems no reason to believe that first-generation Lamanite women who marry Nephites could expect the color of their skin to change. Rather, the children of such marriages (polygamous or not) seem to be the targets of a degree of noticeable supernatural intervention. Inasmuch as the curse and redemption of the Lamanites are exclusively a white-male-and-black-female affair and quite possibly polygamous in nature, the curse might also be said to guard against it ever becoming amorous but rather interracial polygamous sex as cold and puritanical as its white Utah Mormon counterpart is rumored to have been.40 And so changes to some of the references from “white and delightsome” to “pure and delightsome” (at the behest of the book’s author in some cases, with good textcritical authority in others) may indeed represent a harder line where the first generation of Lamanite (women) is concerned. The children of whitered/black union might be described as the cutting edge of the early Mormon plan for racial equality. This is what the Book of Mormon means when it talks of there being no more Nephites and Lamanites. And when there are no more Nephites and Lamanites, there is no more polygamy. If there is, the Book of Mormon seems to suggest that it does not have the approval of heaven and thus constitutes “whoredom.” The suggestion that the early Mormon mission to the Indians was quite daring might be said to but scratch the surface. “If to the modern mind this account of the racial origins of the Indians appears naive and simplistic,” Hansen

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writes, “it is quite in keeping with the intellectual assumptions of the period in which the Book of Mormon was published. . . . Although the Book of Mormon does not say so directly, later exegesis suggests that the curse upon the Lamanites may have been a natural result of their savage way of life. It was because they wore fewer clothes than their Nephite brethren and were more frequently exposed to the sun and weather that they turned into a ‘dark, and loathsome’ people.”41 The intellectual assumptions of the period to which Hansen refers can be traced in one form or another to the work of Samuel Stanhope Smith (yet another Smith), who proffered a climate-based theory of the origins of the different races that took issue with the emerging polygenesis, or American school, and a lot of sophisticated talk about a series of supernatural creations and divinely controlled climatic zones—one for each of the five racial stocks. His book An Essay on the Causes of the Varieties of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species is a tempting final and singular source for the Book of Mormon discussion of Indian origins, to be sure. The parallels are striking. Although (Samuel Stanhope) Smith believed that black skin was a “defect,” he believed just as strongly in a “cure.” And a simple one it was, in principle. In practice, however, it proved no match for that social and cultural air-borne virus endemic to Americans since Bacon’s rebellion— racism—for he rather bravely (for his time) thought white-black union the quickest and easiest way for the country to heal itself in the midst of escalating North-South tensions over slavery. What is more, his climatic theories had particular application to native Africans, so that what he actually proposed was not some mealy-mouthed white-on-red scenario but white on black.42 White on red, in principle at least, was redundant. If America was “naturally suited to the white race,” then Native Americans, he surmised, were Caucasians. As Winthrop D. Jordan explains, the color red (in the white mind) was a product of too much “bear grease and war paint.”43 Climate plays a role in the transformation of Nephites into Lamanites and back again. Miscegenation is also how the good work of racial reclamation will be done on the ground. However, inasmuch as the Book of Mormon can be seen as a discussion of Indian, not African-American, origins, its use of the curse of Canaan myth suggests that the reclamation of native peoples could not simply be left to nature or even to nurture but to divinely inspired, sanctioned, and carefully controlled white-red polygamous union. The early Mormon mission to the Lamanites may well have had no intentions of making Indian men either the beneficiaries or the victims of its racial elevating. Its attacks seem directed, in fact, at males of color—Indian and African. To what degree its appeal

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to women cut across racial lines completely (again in principle) finds support both in the text and elsewhere—the redemption of the Lamanites per se being a marriage proposal to as many women of either Native American or African ancestry who would walk through the temple on the arms of less-than-adoring, duty-bound white grooms. Smith’s instruction to Mormon missionaries to marry Indian women, promising that their offspring would be “white, delightsome and just,” like unto the Nephites, supports this.44 Whether it included African-American women in any sense seems doubtful. According to my reading of the Book of Mormon, however, it perhaps should have. “Had I any thing to do with the Negro,” Smith wrote in 1842 in his journal, “I would confine them by strict laws to their own Species.”45 Another journal entry, dated February 8, 1844, contains the details of a court trial in which he fined “2 negroes” for “trying to marry white women” (p. 445). Mormonism might indeed be said to stand on the Masonic social vanguard, opening its lodge or temple to white women (by marriage), to be sure, but to native women and perhaps even to African women as well, discriminating against men of African ancestry rather than men and women of color per se. One thing seems certain. We should not presume that Smith’s instruction to Mormon missionaries to take “Lamanite wives” was an invitation for aboriginal men to come and do likewise in the white community. Moreover, though the two unfortunate black suitors sent packing were certainly victims of racism, their gender may have been a factor, too. In both cases, the Mormon prophet proceeded on good authority from the Book of Mormon, extending the (white, male) hand of full fellowship to women of native ancestry.     in the Book of Mormon, as I have noted. Men of color are particularly at issue, however, a priestly class of apostate males who drag loving wives and adoring children down with them. The book’s critique of “apostate Masonry” is aimed at men (of color), not women, for the most part. This may be one of the reasons the book contains precious little that speaks exclusively to women. Mormon feminists have mistaken this for a kind of patriarchal myopia that ignores women as a matter of course. The paucity of female input, however, can also be seen as good news indeed for women of color generally. Women are left out of the discussion because it does not concern them. They are only guilty of being dutiful wives and daughters of the apostate priesthood, of “mixing their seed with the Lamanites,” and for this reason perhaps the curse of Canaan will not be a permanent mark on their record. The redemption of the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon, then—the

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metamorphosis from black to white—can be seen as an olive branch to obeisant women of color. The curse of the Lamanites can be seen as no less gender specific—a discussion of male depravation, in other words (p. 584). Not unlike Nephi’s use of “fair and delightsome,” word choice is telling. Passages that describe the Lamanites as a “stiffnecked people . . . whose hearts delighteth in the shedding of blood; whose days have been spent in the grossest iniquity; whose ways have been the ways of a transgressor from the beginning,”46 do not apply to women. Enos, another prophet in the Book of Mormon, explains that: the people of Nephi did seek diligently to restore the Lamanites unto the true faith in God. But our labors were vain; their hatred was fixed, and they were led by an evil nature, that they became wild, and ferocious, and a bloodthirsty people; full of idolatry, and filthiness; feading [sic] upon beasts of prey, dwelling in tents, and wandering about the wilderness, with a short skin girded about their loins, and their heads shaven; and their skill was in the bow, and the cimeter, and the axe.— And many of them did eat nothing save it was raw meat; and they were continually seeking to destroy us. (pp. 144–145)

Assuming, of course, that Lamanite women did not burn their bras and shave their heads, these and other passages can be seen as a criticism of the degradation of the Lamanite male and perhaps of the hopelessness of that mission and that mission only. Samuel the Lamanite is the exception—a native convert to Christianity sent to preach repentance to his otherwise righteous Nephite cousins—the quintessence of nobility and savagery, a veritable red John the Baptist and thus a reconstituted white Lamanite (pp. 441ff). A congregant of godly Lamanites who “grow exceedingly in the knowledge of their God . . . because of their easiness and willingness to believe in his word” (p. 425), his oratory a Jeffersonian tribute to native eloquence, such a character is simply too good to be true.47 In fact, the reason for the occasional and brief suspension of male endogamous monogamy seems entirely in the hope of more like Samuel coming into the world. To be fair, the Book of Mormon errs on the side of a cautious pessimism where the salvation of the red man is concerned. In most cases, black on red— for the average Lamanite male, that is—does not wash off. The book attacks an exclusively male priesthood that is said to reach as far back as Cain, the first murderer in the Bible. The construction of the ill-fated Tower of Babel is but

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one of the many attempts to take heaven by force by his male descendants, a band of male malcontents who wreak havoc wherever they go.48 The Gadianton robbers, the worst of the Lamanites,49 murder for gain as Cain did.50 Seantum is accused of murdering his brother, Seezoram. Not unlike Cain of old, he denies any knowledge of his sibling’s whereabouts: “And ye shall say unto him, Have ye murdered your brother? . . . And behold, he shall deny unto you; and he shall make as if he were astonished; nevertheless, he shall declare unto you that he is innocent” (p. 433). When Seantum is confronted, his feigned astonishment revives Cain’s infamous rejoinder, “I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). The allusion to the mark of Cain and curse of Canaan in the Book of Mormon, then, is a condemnation of men who forsake the true priesthood and murder for gain, making them sons of perdition like Cain and thus a lost cause. In the end, the Nephites are exterminated by the Lamanites at a place the Book of Mormon calls “Camorah,” also the name of a Spanishborn secret dagger society organized in Italy in 1820 (the Camorra) and a word that means “to quarrel.”51 This brings us back to the question of the priesthood ban against blacks and whether the Book of Mormon may indeed be seen as soft on women of color but taking the hard line where men of color (of mixed blood, in particular) are concerned. In some respects, ordination only confuses the issue, since ordination and priesthood are not necessarily the same thing. The offices of the priesthood are not the priesthood; rather, the temple is the priesthood. Allowing women to go through the temple as equal participants with men can be seen as an ordination. In modern Mormon parlance, one talks of going through the temple in order to receive the saving ordinances—the new and everlasting covenant of marriage chief among them. The endowment, another word for the temple ritual, implies priesthood power, a fact that seems lost on most modern Mormons, who presume that priesthood comprises exclusively the administrative degrees of deacon, teacher, priest, elder, seventy, and high priest. The debate over whether the priesthood ban was a practice or a doctrine, whether Smith—who ordained a few black men—would have approved or disapproved, may indeed be somewhat beside the point. If the temple is the priesthood, then those who contend for a gentler, kinder Smith on the issue of blacks and priesthood do not have even a single leg to balance on. The Mormon prophet was in no sense immune to the racism of his day, “an unfortunate and embarrassing survival of a once expedient institution,” according to many, and a corollary of social forces contemporaneous with the Mormon flight from Missouri.52 Still, a sizable body of evidence suggests that he

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would never have approved of the overtly racist policies of Brigham Young— the priesthood ban against blacks, in particular.53 Mormonism under Young was Anglo-Saxon—Germanic, Scandinavian, and British, for the most part.54 Increasingly, conversion to Mormonism came to be seen as a process of racial bonding and naturalization that did not include people of color.55 To be fair, as Bringhurst explains, Mormons “shared those racist ideas prevalent in American society” and thus “incorporated these attitudes and practices into the superstructure of their theology and doctrine as it was being developed by Joseph Smith and other church leaders during Mormonism’s formative years.”56 A foremost authority (his scholarship playing a decisive role in the change of policy), Lester E. Bush suggests that “Joseph Smith . . . provided a context which, in his absence, inevitably led to a policy of priesthood denial to blacks.”57 Ronald K. Esplin agrees. In his view, Young proceeded on the basis of an understood fact, “doing nothing he did not see Smith do.”58 Smith’s advisers were anti-African and proslavery almost to the man: Charles B. Thompson, Lyman Wight (who led a company of Saints to Texas), and Sidney Rigdon, as well as Brigham Young.59 Of great help to the cause to end discrimination based on race was the important fact that Smith had ordained several black men. The ordination of Elijah Abel and a couple of other African-American men, as Jessie L. Embry writes in her book Black Saints in a White Church, is surely “an obstacle to those who try to trace priesthood denial to Joseph Smith.”60 However, Abel was a mulatto with very fair skin, by all accounts, and his ordination was revoked the moment his African ancestry became known—that single and deciding drop of Cainite blood tipping the balance the other way.61 At the same time, he continued to be an active member of the Third Quorum of Seventies until his death in 1884, being called to serve a mission for the church.62 The only fact of any real importance or relevance is that he was not permitted to go through the temple and be sealed to his wife. Samuel Chambers was another black man whose ordination did not qualify him to go through the temple and be sealed to his wife and children. The case of Jane Manning James, the black domestic servant of Joseph and Emma Smith, is no less telling. Her request to be sealed to Walker Lewis (another black ordained by Smith, though not her husband) was denied. Jane then claimed that Emma had offered to have her sealed to Joseph as a child. This was also denied. The best she could do was to be adopted into the Smith family as their servant in a special ceremony (pp. 40–41). Ironically, under polygamy, her chances of being sealed were probably as good as they were

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  Brother Joseph Brant, the Mohawk Chief Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:150a.

going to get for a long, long time. Both Smith and Young seemed unaware of how dangerously close to mere “whoredom” Mormon polygamy came by not being more open to women of color. Mormonism could and would discriminate against men of color in good faith as the cursed offspring of Cain and the apostate priesthood—sons of perdition. That Smith ordained black men to the offices of the priesthood but drew the line at the temple suggests that he and Young were in agreement. Men of

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African (Cainite/Cainanite/Canaanite) descent were apostate Masons and thus to be barred from the priesthood. For Smith, however, the priesthood was the temple. Under Young, it was extended to include the offices of deacon, teacher, priest, elder, seventy, and high priest. Young’s was not a harder line but rather a broader one that can be seen to contravene the adoptive spirit of the Book of Mormon, denying women of color even the most nominal claim to what was rightfully theirs if they wanted it: a place in the kingdom of God as a plural wife, the polygamous woman of color being a necessary evil in the resurrection of a chosen seed and thus the redemption of the Lamanites. The priesthood ban was lifted almost a hundred years after the Mormon church published its first official statements announcing the last divinely sanctioned polygamous marriages. The efforts of women missionaries such as Embry (who worked for the church in the Halifax, Canada, Mission in the midseventies) played an important role in the dramatic change in policy and ordination of black men to the priesthood and the admittance of black men and women to the temple. The case of Mary Frances Sturlaugson, a black woman convert from Tennessee, is also instructive. For her, the issue of priesthood denial revolved around white women who were being called to do missionary work without being ordained. It did not occur to her that this might permit the black men of the church (the few there were) to fulfill a term of service—in effect, as stretcher bearers for the cause. Rather, her first thought was that the black women of the church ought to be the first to go.63 The revelation lifting the ban came so quickly on the heels of this realization that it is possible that the growing number of female missionaries may have played the most decisive role in ending racial discrimination against men and women of color in this allwhite, male-dominated church. Based on my reading of the Book of Mormon and the notion that divinely sanctioned polygamy of the interracial regenerative kind was to be a kind of backdoor to the temple for women of color and their children only as part of a scheme of race regeneration, a lifting of the priesthood ban against males of African descent was perhaps inevitable, the only means left to the church in the wake of monogamous, Evangelical conformity to keep its promises to “the daughters of the Lamanites.” (The church’s role in placing Indian children in Mormon homes as foster children had proven less than satisfactory to everyone concerned by that time. Any thoughts of integration of even the paternalistic kind seemed to evaporate in the stifling Utah heat.) Whether Kimball consulted his Book of Mormon or not, his decision to open the doors of the temple to the sons and daughters of Cain in the broad sense marks the end of the re-

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demption of the Lamanites as originally conceived by Smith as a radical, albeit flawed, plan for racial renewal through interracial marriage on a grand scale. Modern Mormonism and its monogamous family lifestyle are no longer a purely white-on-white affair, to be sure, but neither are they a white-andblack/black-and-white affair, either. According to the Book of Mormon, a multiplicity of Indian and African women were to pass through the temple, joined in holy matrimony to a monogamous white male with a white spouse without this being a contradiction. In the pecking order, polygamous women of color would find themselves at the beck and call of the singular white mistress of the house. (One assumes that poor Fanny Stenhouse would have blown a gasket.) In a sense, early Mormonism veered off the path of the Book of Mormon when the elders of the church (Smith included) took no Lamanite wives and twentyand-four daughters of the Nephites to the temple and then to their beds, committing the very sin, according to the book, that produced Nephites and Lamanites—white and black—and thus laying waste to the early utopian dream of salvation bi-race alone.

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the economic kingdom of god: masonic utopianism unveiled “Do the Mormons believe in having all things in common?” No. —Joseph Smith Jr. We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a New Community in his waistcoat pocket. —Emerson to Carlyle, 1840

   had deep waistcoat pockets, indeed. None of his “new communities,” however, not even those founded on the Law of Consecration and Stewardship (also known as the United Order and/or the Order of Enoch), was truly radical: they were neither early Marxist collectives nor had much in common with the systems favored by contemporary socialists such as the Shakers and the Oneidan Perfectionists. In fact, Smith’s economics, every step along the way, toed the Jacksonian line of rugged self-reliance and dogged determination, as well adhering to the essentially conservative theorizing of contemporaries such as John L. O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan attacked artificial distinctions only, defending the fruits of hard work and thrift, and thus natural distinctions, as perfectly consistent with the Republican ideal of a “classless society.”1 Brown University social scientist Lester Ward, a disciple of O’Sullivan, thought that “fraternalism” rather than “competition” allowed individuals to have their cake without taking food out of the mouths of the poor. What he called the principle of “Sociocracy” gave credence to a measure of natural inequality, the real bugaboo in American society being the existence of too many “artificial inequalities.”2 And what was the role of government in all of this? The less the better, of course, the judicious regulation of modern science holding up the rear. Let us not be swayed by Mormonism’s enemies, who unfairly accused the Saints of such economic evils as pooling their resources in order to prosper collectively and individually. These were the sour grapes of locals in Kirtland,

T

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Ohio, Jackson County, Missouri, and Nauvoo, Illinois, making a mountain out of a molehill. Early Mormonism’s rapid growth and collective wealth may have been the consequence of a divinely regulated cooperative scheme, but the faith was not quite communistic. The individual not only had some say but owned shares; there was very little in the way of an enforced radical community of goods. “For not only did Joseph Smith succeed in reconciling contrarieties then animating the little flock in Kirtland,” Thomas O’Dea observed long ago, “he also brought together in a single social pattern two important tendencies in the behavior of western America: hardy, self-reliant individualism and the friendly urge toward mutual helpfulness.”3 Leonard J. Arrington’s seminal Great Basin Kingdom cautions against a crude conflict interpretation, too, having this to say: One is tempted to conclude that, while the Mormons boasted of being a “peculiar people,” their economic program was definitely “unpeculiar” in the America of its birth. Central Planning, organized cooperation, and the partial socialization of investment implicit in Mormon theory would seem to have been a part of the democratic theory of the Founding Fathers. Unquestionably, traditional American thought and practice sanctioned the positive use of public agencies to attain given group objectives, and this was, of course, the Mormon formula.

  that “communitarianism” was a “sister movement” that drew its inspiration “from the same sources.” But in the West, “Mormon institutions [were] the more typically early American, and the individualistic institutions of other Westerners . . . the more divergent.” He continues: “It may yet be conceded that the well-publicized conflicts and differences between Mormons and other Westerners and Americans were not so much a matter of plural marriage and other reprehensible peculiarities and superstitions as of the conflicting economic patterns of two generations of Americans, one of which was fashioned after the communitarian concepts of the age of Jackson, and the other of which was shaped by the dream of bonanza and the individual sentiments of the age of laissez faire.”4 Arrington’s notion that conflict arose because of a kind of economic generation gap is compelling. Mormonism’s critics were wrong to accuse it of dreary war communism. The real problem lay in a concerted attempt to achieve greater balance between the needs of the individual and those of the larger community. Hardcore individualists and uncompromising communitarians drifted in and out of the church, unable to abide such a balanced approach.5 John Corrill (an ardent

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liberal) and Alpheus Cutler (the radical communitarian) joined and then left because, for the one, it was too communal and, for the other, too liberal. What first attracted adherents and drove them away were not too many or too few concessions to laissez-faire but a consistent Jacksonianism that seemed too good to be true, far too competitive and cooperative to be democratic. Ironically, the Book of Mormon does not figure in any of this; rather, it seems to defend a radical communitarianism that ends in failure, the Nephites lacking the will to live according to higher economic laws. Economic historians of Arrington’s stature, however, have a friend in the Book of Mormon, a defense of classic Jacksonian economic theory in keeping with the general Masonic understanding of such things. Whether in the Northeast, Southwest, or the wild, wild West, Mormonism represented an overly traditional, indeed classic early American economic system that seemed ill suited to the emergent modern world of naked competition and a purely market-driven economy. Neither did the move southward and then westward do much to increase Mormonism’s chances of acceptance. The encroaching transcontinental railroad made sure of this. The Book of Mormon does not favor radical community of goods or even suggest that socialist utopian dreams really can come true during the millennium. Even the utopian society that Jesus establishes among the Nephites is not quite what it seems. “And they had all things common among them,” the book says, “therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free.”6 They are eventually destroyed by the Lamanites because they “have their goods and substance no more common among them, and they began to be divided into classes, and they began to build up churches unto themselves, to get gain, and began to deny the true church of Christ” (p. 516). Hansen is quite right to suggest that “the Book of Mormon . . . describe[s] the Nephites as living in ideal Christian communities, with no poor among them.”7 It does not necessarily follow, however, that the Book of Mormon ideal simply proved too lofty for both Nephites and Latter-day Saints. Especially problematic is the argument that Mormons rejected “the Jacksonian doctrine of equality of opportunity in favor of the more radical principle of equality of condition,” in part because of the Book of Mormon, but “it was soon obvious to the prophet that the realization of such ideals would have to be deferred until the Saints had removed themselves from the world, both physically and spiritually” (pp. 126–127). Neither the Book of Mormon nor Mormonism’s early communities in Ohio and then Missouri and Illinois constitute a case that Mormon economics represented a radical departure from the Jacksonian norm.

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Without doubt, the first Mormon settlements seemed to favor the communal holding of goods, which neighbors thought suspiciously un-American. The community-of-goods ideal refers to both radical redistribution of wealth and conservative admonitions simply to care for the needy. Early Mormonism tended to favor an economic variant of the latter, perhaps overly hierarchical but nonetheless a system of Christian mutual aid in the main. As James M. Stayer points out in his book The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods, the reference in the Book of Acts to the early church practice of having all things in common is open to more than one interpretation.8 Swiss Anabaptists thought it described a rule of sharing (within families) and thus an edict against exploitation. Moravians assumed that it prescribed a regimented economic equality. Christian mutual aid, then, has allowed Mennonites and Mormons to reap a bounteous harvest without feeling obliged to give it away. Brigham Young’s estate, for example, was valued at a million dollars at the time of this death in 1877.9 Leadership had spiritual and material dividends, including special land allotments and seats on church-owned corporations. Quinn explains: “The greatest improvements in income and wealth came with service as the President of the Church, then as his counselors, then as the Presiding Bishop and Quorum of the Twelve, then as the counselors to the Presiding Bishop, and to the least degree, if at all, with service as Council of Seventy.”10 At present, the LDS Church is one of the richest (for its size) in the world, with an extensive investment portfolio that any of the larger American denominations would be proud to call its own.11 Its constituents in the United States are among the better-educated and financially well-off of the middle class. So long as they do not forget to look after the needs of the poor among them, Mormons have no need to fear any material prosperity that might come their way. When Smith arrived in Kirtland to become acquainted with an entire congregation of radical, communitarian Campbellite converts, they soon discovered that their new religious head was no utopian socialist. The first order of church business amounted to the suspension of community of goods in favor of what Smith called “the Law of Consecration and Stewardship,” a “more perfect law of the Lord.”12 According to the Law of Consecration, church members are stewards rather than property owners. Private property is deeded to the church and then deeded back to its original owners, who are then free to add to it in any way they please. Any surplus, however, goes to the bishop, who in turn uses it to assist the poor and fund community construction projects. Early Mormon economic policy resolved to eradicate poverty

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without stifling the entrepreneurial spirit consistent with the American dream of economic, social, and political mobility that did not discriminate on the basis of class. The market economy left to its own devices bred inequality and poverty, too. Were one to find a way to regulate the ill effects of the market without government getting involved, then the needs of rich and poor would be looked after equally. One of Smith’s early 1831 revelations explains: Wherefore, hear my voice and follow me, and you shall be a free people, and ye shall have no laws but my laws when I come, for I am your lawgiver. . . . For what man among you having twelve sons . . . and saith unto the one: Be thou clothed in robes and sit thou here; and to the other: Be thou clothed in rags and sit thou there—and looketh upon his sons and saith I am just? Behold . . . I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine. . . . And if ye seek riches which it is the will of the Father to give unto you, ye shall be the richest of all people, for ye shall have the riches of eternity; and it must needs be that the riches of the earth are mine to give; but beware of pride, lest ye become as the Nephites of old.13

,  would make aristocrats of all its citizens—who sported purple robes rather than a red flag. It appealed to the temporarily out of work, entrepreneurs down on their luck who were eager to reclaim their lost birthright. The revelation continues: And I hold forth and deign to give unto you greater riches, even a land of promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, upon which there shall be no curse when the Lord cometh; And I will give it unto you for the land of your inheritance, if you seek it with all your hearts. And this shall be my covenant with you, ye shall have it for the land of your inheritance, and for the inheritance of your children forever, while the earth shall stand, and ye shall possess it again in eternity, no more to pass away. But, verily I say unto you that in time ye shall have no king nor ruler, for I will be your king and watch over you. (sect. 38:18–21)

Kirtland had been a providential detour on the road to Zion, which, according to revelation, was in Jackson Country, Missouri, not far from Independence. As Mormons bought up land and banded together to practice the Law of Consecration and Stewardship, Missourians in the neighborhood began to object and finally threatened civil war. Outnumbered, the Mormons were forced to

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give up their land and their experiment in economics in 1834. A lesser law, the Law of Tithing, took its place, a temporary proviso—so the argument goes— that required the Saints to pay one-tenth of their surplus to the church annually (sect. 119). As Leonard Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean May explain in their book Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons, in principle the Law of Tithing was not a radical departure from the Law of Consecration.14 The Law of Consecration and Stewardship has never been reinstated because the Law of Tithing—revelations to the contrary notwithstanding—can be viewed as superior rather than inferior. The Law of Tithing simply meant that the Mormon economic kingdom had a much better chance of amassing the collective wealth it required if it allowed its membership to keep a bigger portion of their hard-earned money. The Law of Tithing struck a better balance of acquisition and cooperation than the Law of Consecration and Stewardship had. The Saints were admonished to be of one mind and heart, one in purpose—caring for the poor in their ranks but getting rich as quickly as possible, too. Under Brigham Young, the Law of Consecration and Stewardship was reinstated. A few communalistic experiments (such as Orderville) came and went as a result. As a rule, however, economic association in pioneer Utah was of the joint-stock type. The Brigham City Cooperative (a joint-stock company and the brainchild of Lorenzo Snow) became the model for Young’s regionwide consumers’ cooperative system of 1868. Mormons were stockholders with a stake in local businesses and the larger economy. Arrington, Fox, and May explain that “virtually the entire town worked for the cooperative, the opening and closing of the departments were uniformly regulated by the ringing of a bell in the courthouse tower” (p. 117). Daily life in the Mormon village was a beehive of activity, productivity, uniformity, and solidarity. The economic policies of the church under Heber J. Grant—in particular, his Church Security Plan, or Welfare System—were likewise of the joint-stock type. President of the LDS Church at the time of the Great Depression, Grant was critical of the New Deal, although he supported federal work-relief programs. He objected to the dole, making an exception for America’s worthy poor—the sick, aged, or disabled—who ought to receive charity. “Our primary purpose in organizing the Church Security Plan,” he reasoned in 1939, “was to set up a system under which the curse of idleness will be done away with, the evils of the dole abolished, and independence, industry, thrift, and self-respect be once more established among our people. . . . Work is to be re-enthroned

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as the ruling principle in the lives of our Church members.”15 For much of the Depression, the Mormon Church refused to accept federal assistance, gaining considerable public support because of its hardy self-reliance during such a difficult period in America’s history. Ironically, some outsiders thought the Church Welfare System was communistic. J. Reuben Clark Jr., Grant’s second counselor, defended the church against the charge of harboring communist sympathies. In truth, some of its bishops were guilty as charged, seeing in the rise of communism a vestige of the United Order. As John R. Sillito and John S. McCormick have shown, Mormon bishops made up a large contingent of the Socialist Party in Utah.16 But Clark, an outspoken critic of Communism at home and abroad (as well as an apologist for the faith), was nonetheless quite correct when he insisted that Mormonism was and always had been the antithesis of communism. “There is a growing—I fear it is growing—sentiment that communism and the United Order are virtually the same thing,” Clark lamented, “communism being merely a forerunner, so to speak, of the reestablishment of the United Order.” He chastised bishops who “belong to communistic organizations [and] are preaching this doctrine,” using the Mormon scriptures to repudiate what he called “dead level equality.” Equality, Clark surmised, “will vary as much as the man’s circumstances, his family, his wants and needs, may vary.” The United Order, he pointed out, “was not a communal life, as the Prophet Joseph Smith, himself, said . . . but an individualistic system . . . built on the principle of private ownership of property.”17 Clark was careful not to mention the Book of Mormon, which he may have thought a contradiction. In the Book of Mormon, the Nephites never practice anything like radical community of goods—even though they are said to have “all things in common.” The text explains precisely what it means by this, and it involves not radical community of goods but “every man dealing justly, one with another.” The only dead leveling in the Book of Mormon is of a spiritual kind. Passages that bespeak an equal distribution of wealth refer to “Heavenly gifts.”18 Nephites of various economic and social standings have the church, an abiding faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ, an equal superabundance of genuine and heartfelt love for one another, equal access to the spirit of God, and myriad gifts of the spirit. Mere economic equality pales in significance. The utopian social order that Jesus inaugurates in the New World is a case in point. For roughly two centuries, a period of peace and prosperity ensues. The Nephites are universally virtuous. Government is essentially nonexistent. Even racial distinctions disappear. The people are of one race, one mind, one heart,

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one faith, dealing justly one with the other without any interference from the state. The church itself plays no significant role (at least not one that is easy to detect). Yet there are still rich and poor—though no one goes hungry. This is because the Book of Mormon does not criticize the accumulation of individual wealth per se but rather the ostentation of great wealth. The “exceeding rich” are those the Book of Mormon ridicules for becoming “lifted up in their pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel, and all manner of fine pearls, and of the fine things of this world. And from that time,” it goes on to say, “they did have their goods and their substance no more in common among them” (p. 516). What the Book of Mormon counsels against, then, is conspicuous consumption. The Lord gladly showers his riches, material and spiritual. Those so blessed should be mindful, therefore, to avoid ostentation, parting with enough of their substance to look after the basic needs of the poor. The Book of Mormon extolls the virtues of hard work and its concomitant rewards. Nephi instructs his people “that they should be industrious, and that they should labor with their hands” (p. 72). Wealth, if acquired in the proper way—by hard work, thrift, ingenuity, and a conservative but steady accumulation of surplus capital—is the fruit of righteousness. Jacob expounds the finer points of righteous acquisitiveness this way: Many of you have begun to search for gold, and for silver, and all manner of precious ores, in the which this land, which is a land of promise unto you, and to your seed, doth abound most plentifully. And the hand of Providence hath smiled upon you most pleasingly, that you have obtained many riches; and because that some of you have obtained more abundantly than that of our brethren, ye are lifted up in the pride of your hearts, and wear stiff necks, and high heads, because of the costliness of your apparel, and persecute your brethren, because that ye suppose that ye are better than they. And now my brethren, do ye suppose that God justifieth you in this thing? Behold, I say unto you, Nay.

  the Deity is the gratuitous display of wealth, the tendency of some (not all) to deem themselves better than others simply because of their net worth. Jacob thus counsels the wealthier members of Nephite society to “think of your brethren, like unto yourselves, and be familiar with all, and free with your substance, that they may be rich like unto you.” Again, Jacob explains: “But before ye seek for riches, seek ye the Kingdom of God. And after that ye have obtained a hope in Christ, ye shall obtain riches, if ye seek them; and ye will seek them for the intent to do good; to clothe the naked, and to feed

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the hungry, and to liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick, and the afflicted” (p. 126). The Nephites under Alma also live briefly as a near-perfect society. “For the preacher,” Alma writes, was no better than the hearer, neither was the teacher better than the learner: and thus they were all equal, and they did all labor, every man according to his strength; and they did impart of their substance every man according to that which he had, to the poor, and the needy, and the sick, and the afflicted; and they did not wear costly apparel, yet they were neat and comely. . . . And now because of the steadiness of the Church, they began to be exceeding rich; having abundance of all things whatsoever they stood in need; an abundance of flocks, and herds, and fatlings of every kind, and also abundance of grain, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious things; and abundance of silk and fine twined linen, and all manner of good homely cloth. And thus in their prosperous circumstances they did not send away any which was naked, or that was hungry, or that was athirst, or that was sick, or that had not been nourished; and they did not set their hearts upon riches; therefore they were liberal to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, whether out of the Church or in the Church, having no respect to persons as to those who stood in need; and thus they did prosper and become far more wealthy, than those who did not belong to their Church. (pp. 223–224)

 , unfortunately, “the people of God began to wax proud, because of their exceeding riches . . . for they began to wear very costly apparel” (p. 230). And so, wealth became problematic. By the time of Helaman, wealthier Nephites “obtain the sole management of the government, insomuch that they did trample under their feet, and smite, and rend, and turn their backs upon the poor, and the meek, and humble followers of God” (p. 425). White-collar, middle-class occupations suddenly appear, “for there were many merchants in the land, and also many lawyers, and many officers. And the people began to be distinguished by ranks, according to their riches, and their chances for learning . . . and thus there became a great inequality in all the land” (p. 466). Here is the economic pattern the Book of Mormon wishes to attack: the acquisition of wealth by unfair means, the denigration of labor, the ostentation of the rich and its debilitating effects on the lower classes, and finally the dire, long-term social and political consequences—anarchy, slavery, and, eventually, assimilation and/or genocide. A number of ideal Nephite societies

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come and go before the appearance of Jesus and this last-ditch attempt to reestablish an idealized agrarian social order based on conservative economic principles. It fails because of the emergence of a permanent aristocracy that amasses great wealth at the expense and dissolution of the social, economic, and political order. The Book of Mormon, then, speaks to rich and poor alike. Yet the problem of poverty looms large, even during the best of times. In some respects, the poor, like the Lamanites, exist to test the mettle of the righteous. Ideally, the more affluent members of society exist to give a portion of their increase to the poor, not as a temporary respite but as part of a larger scheme to ameliorate economic hardship by encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit. Poverty is a constant drain on Nephite high society, and the Book of Mormon takes a somewhat pragmatic approach. Even the unqualified words of King Benjamin, which adjure the righteous not to ignore the petition of the beggar (for we are all beggars at the judgment seat of Christ), has a caveat. King Benjamin’s philanthropy is decidedly right of center, for he also cautions: “See that all things are done in wisdom and order: for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than what he hath strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize” (p. 165). The prize is economic self-sufficiency and mobility. Feed a man for a day, but be sure to teach him to feed himself for a lifetime, too. The message here is quite conservative. Poverty is unavoidable but curable. Interminable poverty, on the other hand, is clearly a sign of poor character and altogether a different matter. Finally, let us not confuse the passage in the Book of Mormon “I would that ye should impart of your substance to the poor, every man according to that which he hath . . . according to their wants” (p. 165) with the Marxian axiom “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” The Mormon version is more than likely Masonic in nature. Indeed, the Book of Mormon discussion of wealth and poverty and, in particular, of the centrality of charity is entirely consistent with the Masonic understanding. “Charity is the chief cornerstone of our temple,” Mackey writes in A Lexicon of Freemasonry, “and upon it is to be erected a superstructure of all the other virtues, which make the good man and the good Mason.”19 Christian Knights, not unlike King Benjamin in the Book of Mormon, are only in the service of God when serving their fellow beings. “Benevolence,” Grand Master Rob Morris writes in his “Practical Synopsis of Masonic Law and Usage,” “is one of the leading purposes of the Masonic Institution. . . . The rule is, ‘as much as the necessity of the applicant demands and the need of the giver justify.’ ” Here, then, is a more

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likely homology for the Book of Mormon’s ideas regarding the proper dispensing of charity to the poor. Masonic charity militates against institutional assistance, what it calls “a regular fund set aside for that purpose.” Rather, “the hearts and purses of worthy Brethren” are said to “form an inexhaustible fountain for this purpose.” Moreover, the monitors stipulate that “any system of benevolence by which the dispensation of charity shall be equal in amount among the applicants, is unmasonic.”20 In the third section of the Entered Apprentice Degree “brotherly love” and “relief” are taught. “To relieve the distressed is a duty incumbent on all men,” the aspirant is told, “but particularly on Masons, who are linked together by an indissoluble chain of sincere affection. To soothe the unhappy, to sympathize with their misfortunes, to compassionate their miseries, and to restore peace to their troubled minds, is the grand aim we have in view. On this basis we form our friendships, and establish our connections.”21 In an increasingly mobile society, “needy strangers caught up in the . . . uncertainty of post-Revolutionary society,” Bullock writes, “found Masonry’s charitable activities a means of supplementing or even replacing the frayed bonds of family and neighborhood.”22 A widow might have little recourse but to exploit Masonry to great benefit since many local church assemblies were ill equipped or not inclined to be as generous. Masonry offered more than mere pecuniary compensation, digging deep into its pockets without so much as a second thought and providing the widow and orphan with a wide range of social services, too. That Masons were among America’s most acquisitive is not inconsistent with their philanthropy. A Masonic notion of having “all things in common,” as Bullock explains, “makes the prosperity of each individual the object of the whole, [and] the prosperity of the whole the object of each individual” (p. 197). This was the economic basis for the Mormon kingdom of God, perfectly consistent with the Nephite utopias in the Book of Mormon. The metamorphosis of the Law of Consecration and Stewardship into Tithing that transpired on the American frontier was not a departure, either. Evangelicals attacked Masonic relief as mere influence peddling. And when Masons could no longer feed the throngs who appeared on fraternal doorsteps, Americans resented them for any good they had done or might still do. The Masonic economic vision of a voluntary welfare state (a network of old boys) had little choice but to see to the needs of native sons and daughters first. In practice, charity could not be wasted on the interminable poor. Masonic “honey,” as one fraternal humanitarian put it, had to be “well secured from the drones” (cited on p. 195).

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  Labor Is Worship Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:588a.

The early Mormon economic kingdom of God operated according to the same principles and under the same strains, its economic resources far too meager to sustain a Masonic policy of poor relief that did not guarantee results. “And the idler shall not have place in the church,” one of Smith’s revelations says, “except he repent and mend his ways.”23 Interminable poverty might get one into the kingdom, but idleness could easily get one booted out.

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The exclusion of certain ethnic groups (African Americans, in particular) by Masons and Mormons suggests that skin color, more or less as the Book of Mormon tells it, was seen as God’s way of screening applicants, allowing the church to hold on to the rich and the rich to the lion’s share by not forcing them to part with too much of their hard-earned profits to satisfy their obligation to the Lord and fellow human beings. The exclusion of Lamanites of all stripes (idlers one and all in the Book of Mormon’s proto—social Darwinist scheme of things) could be seen as good economic sense at bottom. Including women militated against a multicultural ritual, too, lest there be so little room for advancement that no one climbed the socioeconomic ladder and partook of the sweet fruit of the Acacia. It came down to a choice between race and gender in the end. The early Mormon attempt to liberate women was purchased at the expense of men and women of color, in particular. Moreover, it may not be a coincidence that since the lifting of the priesthood ban against Africans, the modern church has taken a harder and harder line against feminism. The Evangelical alternative may not have been any more inclusive or free from racial bias. Feminism’s antebellum pioneers were racists of a different kind, confident that people not of their color could not compete in a free market. Let them try and fail. Let them watch, too, as white America took the lead through a process of natural (economic) selection. Masonry (and Mormonism, for that matter) had failed to understand that the emerging “herrenvolk democracy” was amenable to an ostensibly open-door racial policy.24 The Evangelical-feminist dream of ending discrimination based on race and gender was no less one sided, an equality of opportunity in which some were clearly more opportune than others. The crusade for women’s rights, nearly two centuries in the making, transformed the “good men made better” of Masonic fame into self-made men, their male counterparts lower down the ladder of success becoming the caricatures of humanhood featured in Susan Faludi’s recent book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, searching for substitutes for the fraternal burst of light, rattling sabers, and institutionalized philanthropy of bygone days.25 Boys will be boys. The founder of Mormonism seemed to understand the American male and his need for masculine role models, the future Church of the United States likely some veiled Masonic reaffirmation of the rights of men to moral self-determination, to worship God, and raise their kids according the dictates of their own consciences.

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postscript the “americanness” of mormonism

The Mormon people teach the American religion. —Tolstoy

  is as much a battle over America as the religion was.1 Critics accused the church of un-American activities. Alexander Campbell, E. D. Howe, John C. Bennett, Pomeroy Tucker, and Orasmus Turner all emphasize the heterodox nature of Mormon beliefs and practices in relation to the Republican, Evangelical mainstream.2 The Mormon response, spearheaded by Parley P. Pratt and John Corrill and even the Prophet’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, defended the faith as both Republican and biblical in the main.3 Smith’s official account of his early religious experiences, The History of the Church, walked a fine line, seeming to locate the early church on the side of American Protestantism.4 Once Mormonism had removed itself safely outside the territorial United States, the level of discussion only appeared to improve. Cultural, historical, and psychological studies attempted to rise above the fray of biblical proof texting and theological warfare. Outsiders like Jules Remy, Julius Brenchley, I. Woodbridge Riley, Eduard Meyer, and Bernard De Voto, and, later, Whitney R. Cross and Thomas O’Dea, even suggested that Mormonism and antebellum America might be less at odds than many first thought.5 Mormons were not slow to reciprocate. Such praise undermined supernaturalism but might be useful to the church in the troubled years following statehood and the protracted end of polygamy.6 Bernard De Voto and Fawn Brodie, despite their critical tone and largely because of their naturalism, paved the way for a

M

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commanding pro-American interpretation of Mormonism, almost to the exclusion of the religion’s alleged un-American activities.7 Hansen attempted to balance the books, revisiting the issue of the revolutionary agenda of the turbulent Nauvoo period, the Council of Fifty, Smith’s religious and political ambitions, and whether he broke any cardinal rules regarding the separation of church and state. Hansen’s nuanced discussion was followed by a slate of conflicting interpretations. Hansen argued for reform by means of political conquest.8 Hill thought the quest for refuge not empire, a sectarian retreat rather than imperialist advance, a more plausible thesis.9 Mario S. DePillis, Jan Shipps, Paul Edwards, and Richard L. Bushman took this one step further, opining that Mormonism was so far removed from the mainstream that it stands alone, a religion in its own right,10 whereas Lawrence Foster, B. Carmon Hardy, and John Brooke showed greater care, not divorcing Mormonism so completely from its natural environment.11 The academy responded with a postmodernist argument that repatriates Mormonism all over again within the notion, popular these days, of the centrality of the periphery. R. Laurence Moore, Nathan O. Hatch, Gordon Wood—to some degree—and Kenneth Winn all offer an argument for continuity on the basis of this literary and philosophical school of thought.12 Hatch explains that “the Mormons used a virtual dictatorship as the means to return power to illiterate men.”13 Moore thinks that incongruities resulted from the Mormon prophet’s realization that the more outrageous his behavior, the more attention he could attract to himself and his movement. Persecution only boosted his self-confidence and banded the Mormon people together. Of the Nauvoo period, Moore writes: Smith entered Nauvoo with a political welcome and a generous city charter that allowed the Mormons a considerable amount of autonomy. Yet, precisely at that point, he embarked on the course of new departures, introduced in politically maladroit ways, that threatened to destroy everything he had created. . . . Rather than warding off the persecution of his ideas, Smith’s strategy of secrecy only intensified it and gave total license to the imaginations of those who wrote anti-Mormon propaganda. Smith, therefore, appears to have used secrecy for another reason, as part of his effort to give his followers a sense of distinct identity. . . . Only after Smith’s assassination was the effectiveness of what he had done apparent.14

  Winn, Mormons only flirted with a fledgling anti-Republicanism. “Mormons had begun their movement in protest against America’s religious pluralism,” Winn writes, “but now, in the face of persecution, they be-

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  Brother William McKinley, Knight Templar and Twice President of the United States Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 1:228b.

came its most ardent defenders.” Mormon communitarianism, he explains, posed no serious problems as it merely represented an attempt to reinstate “older communal beliefs and customs” that appealed most to “persons of New England ancestry, the region strongest in that communal tradition.”15 That said, Smith’s presidential campaign and plans to remove the Saints to some distant location (whether Utah, Texas, California, or possibly even Vancouver Island would be decided after his death) may not be quite the contra-

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  Lieutenant-General Joseph Smith Jr., John C. Bennett, History of the Saints (Boston: Leland and Whiting, 1842), reproduced in Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1986).

diction or as problematic as Hansen first thought, the Council of Fifty a Masonic auxiliary rather than a political institution distinct from the church. If understood as Masonic rather than merely political in some vague, nondescript sense, then the Mormon political kingdom would not have been separate from the church in either principle or practice. Early Mormonism did not conflate church and state but rather lodge and state. Moreover, this was per-

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fectly consistent with antebellum political practice. Politics in the antebellum period operated according to an old-boys club of preordained but democratically elected men of Masonic sensibility and standing. (A political party that dared not speak its name?) Smith merely hoped to use his Masonic connections to great advantage as others had done in order to effect some greater public good. DeWitt Clinton, governor of New York and Grand Master, is a case in point. Smith’s presidential campaign was neither un-American nor ill conceived. As president of the United States, he could instigate a fraternal reclamation scheme at the national level. Should that fail, he had a backup plan, the flight to Utah and thus an achievable Mormon—that is, Masonic—sovereign state within a federal rather than national union of states. Hansen’s thesis, that the Mormon quest for empire (imperium in imperio) was problematic, makes eminent sense in the decades following the Civil War but not before it, when a measure of sovereignty at the state level existed, allowing Mormons to practice their religion with impunity. (Young’s famous telegram to Lincoln at the start of the Civil War, that Utah had not seceded, may have been a threat to leave, too, if it did not get its way, rather than a show of support.) Regardless, the Mormon settlement of Utah can be seen as a Kansas and Nebraska, that bloody struggle between two competing visions for America’s future—free and slave—that Stephen Douglas thought prudent to leave to popular sovereignty. Until such time that the Civil War changed forever the nature of American constitutionalism, redefining the “United” States of America along national rather federal lines in order to avert an endless series of separatist movements,16 Mormonism stood on solid constitutional ground. It did not flee the United States so much as stake out new territory in hope of preserving American Masonry at the state level under the banner of the Mormon-Masonic State of Deseret. A Masonic interpretation of Mormonism also suggests that polygamy, much as Hansen theorizes, can be seen as the handmaid of the political kingdom. In fact, Mormonism under Young may not have been designed merely to allow Mormons to practice polygamy. The Masonic political kingdom (emphasis on the Masonic rather than political element) can be seen as Mormonism’s carefully guarded secret. Polygamy, again more or less as Hansen says, was a social means to a fraternal political end, that being the establishment of the political kingdom of God on earth. B. Carmon Hardy’s arguments for the centrality of polygamy notwithstanding, a Masonic interpretation of early Mormonism clearly supports Hansen’s initial sense of the question, that polygamy was crucial but not central to early Mormonism.

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Congress would take what now seems an extraordinary step, attacking Mormons’ religious liberties. Yet the United States Congress in the nineteenth century may well have understood something that many have since forgotten when they denied Mormonism religious status. Hansen makes a convincing case that what federal authorities hoped to quash was not polygamy but the political kingdom. When Mormons gave Washington what it wanted, promising to end the practice of polygamy in 1890, this was not exactly cause for celebration at the White House—in some important respects, it represented a Mormon victory. What bothered Congress about Mormonism may not have been its politics or Young’s bravado and demagoguery but a strong sense that the so-called American religion was a brand of postrevolutionary Republicanism that had lost the right to self-determination in the great constitutional battle between North and South. Mormonism would be faced with the awful choice not simply of having to give up polygamy to preserve the political kingdom against attack but of having no choice but to give itself over to the reigning Evangelical, Unionist social vision for the future. That said, there is a sense in which Mormonism (as a Masonic countermovement) can be seen as more European than American. Mormonism’s androgynous temple ceremony or endowment (albeit a shadow of its former self because of the removal of blood oaths of late) has yet to find an equal in the United States. The Order of the Eastern Star, for example, might be described as a separate-butunequal institution that restricts itself to women of Masonic lineage and sensibility, the ritual in no sense on par with that of their fathers, husbands, or brothers. One may compare this to European and Mormon Masons, who raise their women (mothers, wives, and daughters) according to the same rituals, seeming not fearful in the least that the second sex will faint at the sight of blood (and crossbones). The chief difference between Mormon and European Masonry seems to be the caste or social class of their respective initiates. The androgynous and deeply mystical rituals of French, German, and Russian Masons pandered to the aristocracy—where, in some respects, a greater degree of gender equality existed as a matter of course as the average aristocratic woman did not take no for an answer. Mormonism took the bold step of presuming to offer men and women of lesser birth the same sense of self-importance and moral worth.17 In a sense, it might be said that Mormons teach European Masonry. Mormonism had its greatest missionary successes not in America but in Great Britain. Most of those who traveled by wagon train or handcart to the Utah desert to build the kingdom of God on earth were British and Scandinavian converts. Americans who joined in the initial decades were often more trouble

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  Arnold Friberg, Mormon Bids Farewell to a Once Great Nation The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).

than they were worth, rejecting polygamy and anything adoptive or egalitarian that followed (such as the vicarious work for the dead). They were, in short, Americans, not pioneers—and certainly not Europeans. The Indians—for whom the book and religion had been created—were all too American, it seemed, the mission to the Lamanites also falling on deaf ears. The Book of Mormon suggests that polygamy was never meant to be a white-on-white affair but to include all of America, that is, white on red and black. Why the original hope of a white race of reconstituted Nephites failed to materialize may have something to do with Mormonism’s European bent as America’s premier androgynous rite—still in a class all its own. And so the restored gospel of the Mormon Rite or Endowment would be preached to the ends of the earth, where it stood a greater chance of being received with an open heart. One presumes that the intention of the missionaries was merely to Americanize not only unsuspecting women like Fanny but men, too, using the

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American wilderness to test their mettle before broaching the subject of the temple and polygamy. Any woman who survived the trek across the plains was more than equal to the symbolic blood and carnage of the temple and the ensuing heartache of polygamous cohabitation. The Mormon Masonic State of Deseret aspired to be an enclave of European Masons, in mind, spirit, and, most of all, body. Unlike the bulk of Europeans to come to America, Mormon converts were brought over not to be Americanized but the reverse—to be the biological agent in the Mormon-Masonic quest for European empire. Then again, was this not essentially the hope of the founding fathers: to create a republic of cosmopolitan Masons or Europeans? And so we come back to the original question of the Americanness of Mormonism as one of timing and perspective. Among the most daring and radical of America’s antebellum knights in shining armor and defenders of the beleaguered patriarchal order of priesthood, Mormonism would live out the original Templar fantasies of its founding fathers to the bitter end, outnumbered by a latter-day Lamanite army of Evangelical soldiers for Christ (and betrayed by an unholy alliance of state and church in the 1890s), they must await the appearance of their Messiah to deliver them from the Saracen dungeons of the Great Basin and the American way.

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:   1. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2. Clyde R. Forsberg Jr., “In Search of the Historical Nephi: The Book of Mormon, ‘Evangelicalisms’ and Antebellum American Popular Culture, c. 1830” (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, 1994), pp. 227–271. 3. Samuel Goodwin, “Mormonism and Masonry–Anti-Masonry in the Book of Mormon,” in The Builder 10 (November–December 1924), 363–364. 4. in this connection, see Anthony W. Ivins, The Relationship of Mormonism and Freemasonry (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1934); Elmer Cecil McGavin, Mormonism and Masonry (Salt Lake City: Stevens and Wallis, 1947); and Hugh Nibley, Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1992), pp. 379–433. 5. Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950). 6. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 64n. 7. John A. Widstoe, “Why Did Joseph Smith Become a Mason?” in Evidences and Reconciliations (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988), pp. 357–359. 8. William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

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9. Carol Berkin, Christopher Miller, Robert Cherny, and James Gormy, Making America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), pp. 299, 317. 10. In this connection, see Mary Beth Norton, Paul D. Escott, Howard P. Chudacoff, David M. Katzman, Thomas G. Paterson, and William M. Tuttle Jr., A People and a Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994); Robert A. Divine, T. H. Breen, George M. Fredrickson, R. Hall Williams, America Past and Present (New York: HarperCollins College, 1995); and James West Davidson, William E. Gienapp, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle, and Michael B. Stoff, Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994). 11. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 223. 12. J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts.: Paladan, 1974), p. 23. 13. In this connection, see Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789–1835 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 14. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 72. 15. Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture: 1880–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 16. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 79–128; Michael Homer, “Masonry and Mormonism in Utah, 1847–1984,” Journal of Mormon History 18 (fall 1992), 57–96; and Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire. 17. Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in EighteenthCentury Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 28–30. 18. See Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), which might be said to take this stance to a degree. 19. Rob Morris, Grand Master of Kentucky (1858–1859), is famous for his service to the Order of the Eastern Star, a women’s lodge, which operated separately and according to a streamlined ritual. The Eastern Star, with Morris’s help, was “adopted” by the Grand Lodge. Morris’s tolerance stopped short of admitting women as active and equal participants, however. In this connection, see Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 2:682.

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20. In this connection, see Jill Mulvay Derr, Janath Russell Cannon, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Women of Covenant: The Story of the Relief Society (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1992). 21. Mrs. T. B. H. Stenhouse, Tell It All: The Tyranny of Mormonism, intro. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1880; reprint, Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur, 1971). 22. D. Michael Quinn, “Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood Since 1843,” in Women and Authority, ed. Maxine Hanks (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1992), pp. 365–409. 23. See in this connection, Thomas R. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 228–252. 24. Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860). 25. In this connection, see Clyde R. Forsberg Jr., “Are Mormons Anabaptists? The Case of the Mormons and Heirs of the Anabaptist Tradition on the American Frontier, c. 1840,” in Radical Reformation Studies: Essays Presented to James M. Stayer, ed. Werner O. Packull and Geoffrey L. Dipple (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 175–191. Also see Michael Driedger, “Crossing Max Weber’s ‘Great Divide’: Comparing Early Modern Jewish and Anabaptist Histories,” in ibid., pp. 157–174. 26. Henry Leonard Stillson and William James Hughan, History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders (New York: Fraternity, 1891), p. 701. 27. In this connection, see Arthur E. Waite, The Secret Tradition in Freemasonry: And an Analysis of the Inter-Relation Between the Craft and the High Grades (London: Rebman, 1911), vols. 1 and 2. 28. Stillson and Hughan, Concordant Orders, p. 732.

:          1. In this connection, see T. Asad, “Religion, Nation-State, Secularism,” in Nation and Religion; Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. P. van der Veer and H. Lehman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 183, citing Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 2. Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons, and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus (Boston: Element, 1997). 3. This sounds suspiciously like the story of the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon, who also use fiery stones, albeit to see in the dark as they make their way to the promised land by sea. 4. This, too, echoes the Book of Mormon. One is struck by the discussion of the Templar practice of wearing tight sheepskin breeches as a badge of chastity, refusing to

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remove them and thus prolonging their virginity rather effectively. See Knight and Lomas, The Hiram Key, p. 34. 5. In this connection, see the discussion of the antebellum New York rivalry between the two in Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 5:213–219. 6. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 95–109. 7. John L. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic,” in Launching the “Extended Republic,” ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 273–309 ff. 8. Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in EighteenthCentury Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 136–175. 9. Tony Fels, “The ‘Non-Evangelical Alliance’: Freemasonry in Gilded-Age San Francisco,” in Religion and Society in the American West, ed. Carl Guarneri and David Alvarev (New York: Lanham, 1987), pp. 221-254. 10. Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789–1835 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 5. 12. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 51. 13. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies,” pp. 283, 310. 14. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, p. 143. 15. Wilkins Tannehill, Sketches of the History of Literature, from the Earliest Period to the Revival of Letters in the Fifteenth Century (Nashville, Tenn., 1829). 16. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, p. 98. 17. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire, p. 100. 18. Salem Town, A System of Speculative Masonry (Salem, N.Y.: Dodd, 1822), p. 67. 19. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, p. 175. 20. Oliver’s Masonic publications are legion, but a good sense of his essential position can be found in R. S. E. Sandbach’s introduction to Oliver’s The Book of the Lodge, 3d. ed. (1864; Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1986), pp. vii–xx. 21. In this connection, see George Oliver, The Antiquities of Freemasonry, comprising illustrations of the five Grand Periods of Masonry, from the Creation of the World to the Dedication of King Solomon’s Temple (1823) and The Star in the East (London, 1823). See also Robert I Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 2:733–735. 22. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:471. 23. Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, pp. 112–149. 24. Cited in ibid., p. 128 n. 35.

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25. See Elnathan Winchester, A Discourse Delivered before the Ancient and Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons . . . (Norwich, Conn., 1795). 26. Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, p. 131. 27. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 36–40. 28. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, p. 178. 29. Cited in Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, p. 181. 30. Cited in Gould, A Library of Freemasonry, 5:213. 31. See Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 459–460. Lucinda is second in line in the long list of Smith’s polygamous wives, married another Mason, George Washington Harris, and then Smith. 32. Henry Leonard Stillson and William James Hughan, History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders (New York: Fraternity, 1891), pp. 508–509. 33. Gentlemen belonging to the Jerusalem Lodge, Jachin and Boaz; or an Authentic Key to the Door of Freemasonry, both Ancient and Modern (London, England, 1762; reprint, Boston: Gilbert and Dean, 1803), p. iv. 34. William Preston, Illustrations of Freemasonry (London: J. Williams, 1772). 35. Rob Morris, preface to Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), p. vii. 36. Hiram B. Hopkins, Renunciation of Freemasonry (Boston, 1830), pp. 7–8. 37. Samuel D. Greene, The Broken Seal (Boston, 1870), p. 42. 38. Samuel Prichard, Masonry Dissected: Being an Universal and Genuine Description of All its Branches, from the Original to the Present Time (London: H. Teape, Tower Hill, n.d.), p. 10. 39. See Ronald P. Formisano and Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest, 1826–1827,” American Quarterly 29 (1977), 139–165. 40. See the chapter on Paine in my “Roots of Early Mormonism: An Exegetical Inquiry” (M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, April 1990), pp. 256–294. 41. Clegg points out that Paine claimed membership in the Craft, having numerous Masonic “colleagues” on both sides of the Atlantic. However, his knowledge of the order is said to have been purely academic. That Masons seem to want to distance themselves from Paine even now perhaps has something to do with his overt paganism. See Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 2:748. 42. In this connection, see William A. Muraskin, Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 31–42, 193–218. Loretta J. Williams, in her book Black Freemasonry and Middle-Class Realities (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980), challenges the notion that Prince Hall Masonry gave itself over to integration to the extent that Muraskin seems to suggest.

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.     1. Donna Hill discusses this with great sensitivity and insight in her book Joseph Smith: The First Mormon (Midvale, Utah: Signature, 1977), p. 10. 2. In this connection, see Wallace Stegner, The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (New York: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 130–131. 3. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 85. 4. Howe’s characterization of Smith is unflattering to say the least. Some of the adjectives he uses to describe the man—lazy, indolent, ignorant, and superstitious—reveal more perhaps about Howe than Smith. Indeed, Howe abandons his polemic for just a moment to offer a characterization of the Mormon prophet that seems right: Smith was a “natural genius, strong inventive powers of mind, a deep study, and an unusually correct estimate of the human passions and feelings.” But Howe sees this in a decidedly poor light. “In short, he is now endowed with all the requisite traits of character,” he intones, “to pursue most successfully the humbug which he has introduced” (E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed [sic] [Painesville: self-published, 1834], pp. 12–13). 5. In this connection, see the latest of the Mormon psychobiographies, Robert D. Anderson, Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1999), pp. ix–xlv, which has an up-to-date list of all such studies, adjudicating in favor of Anderson’s own diagnosis of Smith as possessing a narcissistic personality. 6. See William D. Morain, The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith, Jr., and the Dissociative Mind (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric, 1998). 7. See David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origin of the Book of Mormon (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1985). 8. Ivan J. Barrett, Joseph Smith and the Restoration: A History of the LDS Church to 1846 (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1973), pp. 81–82. 9. Affidavit of Charles Anthon, New York, February 17, 1831, in Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, p. 270. 10. The Mormon understanding and that of the Scottish Rite are similar, though the latter uses the term in reference to persons rather than things. See Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871; reprint, Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1947). Pike writes: “They [the Pharisees] styled themselves Interpreters; a name indicating their claim to the exclusive possession of the true meaning of the Holy Writings, by virtue of the oral tradition which Moses had received on Mount Sinai, and which successive generations of Initiates had transmitted, as they claimed, unaltered, unto them” (p. 259). 11. D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1987), pp. 144–145. 12. In this connection, see Hill, Joseph Smith, p. 76.

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13. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, pp. 271–272. 14. In this connection, see John Money, The Disabled Reader: Education of the Dyslexic Child (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. 263–276. The case of Matthew in Money’s book is interesting: a poor reader whose writing curves downward. 15. Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1984). 16. In this connection, see Linda Sillitoe and Allen D. Roberts, Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1988). 17. This revelation is found in Smith’s personal revelations known as Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 9. 18. But see Persuitte’s Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon. 19. Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 2:1071. 20. In this connection, see Joseph Henry Thayer, The New Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Lafayette, Ind.: Christian Copyrights, 1979), p. 287. Notably, the phrase is used in connection with John the Revelator, though not in the Bible. 21. N is not a vowel, of course; however, a e>—lowercase eta—may have been mistaken for the capital n in EN and thus dropped. 22. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:253–254. 23. Pike, Morals and Dogma, in particular, the discussion of the 26th degree, the Prince of Mercy, or Scottish Trinitarian (pp. 524–577). 24. Francis Barrett, The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer; Being a Complete System of Occult Philosophy (printed for the Temple of Muses) (London, 1801), 1:108–113, 2:107. 25. See Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli, Yerushalmi, and Midrashic Literature (New York: Judaica, 1982), p. 1317. If the transcription is correct, and the third letter is a mem in final rather than medial position, then it could be a genitive possessive, in which case the translation would be “first of the gods.” If the third letter is a samek, the text might be a corrupt spelling of qadosh and thus “holy God” or “God is holy,” a crude Hebrew translation of the Royal Arch motto “Holiness to the Lord.” 26. Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 746. 27. Jastrow, Dictionary, p. 365. If these are numbers, then one suspects that this is meant to be a quasi-Pythagorean formulation—geometry is among the Masonic sciences—but of a mystical type in this series. They could also refer to the advanced degrees of a Master Mason, suggesting the initiate has a long way to go if he means to reach number 33. If the 4, 5, and 6 pertain to the Scottish Rite, then the owner has been inducted as a Secret Master, Perfect Master, and Intimate Secretary; if they refer to the York Rite, then the 4, 5, and 6 suggest that he holds the degrees of Mark Master, Past Master, and Most Excellent Master. 28. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:365. 29. Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 5:194b.

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30. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:290–291. 31. The Orphic Egg is among the symbolism of the Knight of the Brazen Serpent, or 25th Degree, of the Scottish Rite. See Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 472. Also see pp. 402, 783, 404, 254, 663, 400, 655, and 663. 32. The first three rows of characters, going from left to right, might read as follows: (1) the bull, the moon (or female principle of creation), something undecipherable, Cancer, crown (Knights Templar Degree), two crescent moons (another Templar symbol), Jupiter, G (or God?), “Signet of Truth” (Royal Arch Degree) or symbol of Yahweh (Scottish Rite, 33d Degree), cross, sword, crescent moon, Pisces, swastika (Scottish Rite), Masonic jewel (Scottish Rite, Knight of the Brazen Serpent, or 25th Degree), all-seeing eye, Royal Arch cipher for letter C (or Christ?), L (or Logos?), Aries, Enochian cipher, several unreadable characters; (2) G (or God?), Masonic jewel (Scottish Rite, Elected Knight of the Nine, or 9th Degree), square, compass, cross, symbol of family birth signs, Rosy Cross cipher for S (or Smith?), the bull, moon (or female principle of creation), square, compass, crown (Knights Templar Degree), two Enochian ciphers (or first and last letters of the Royal Arch Greek motto E>N> A>R>C>H> HN> O> LOGOS>, “In the beginning was the Word”), L (or Logos?), two crescent moons, Royal Arch cipher for J.J. (or Joseph Jr.?), the bull, cross, Rosy Cross cipher for S (or Smith?), an undecipherable character, moon (or female principle of creation), and L (or Logos?); (3) the bull, an undecipherable character, Royal Arch cipher for J.J. (or Joseph Jr.?), sun (or male principle of creation), square, compass, Taurus or Mercury, G (or God?), an undecipherable character, Saturn, L (or Logos?), Aries, compass, square, G (or God?), double tau (Scottish Rite), Masonic jewel (Scottish Rite, Elected Knight of the Nine, or 9th Degree), Yod (or God), Second Yod (or second God?), G (or God?). 33. Cited in Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 2:738. 34. Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 779.

.      1. B. H. Roberts, New Witness for God (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1909), 3:484. Roberts argues, in fact, that the Book of Mormon does not have an anti-Masonic agenda. 2. Anthony W. Ivins, The Relationship of Mormonism and Freemasonry (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1934), pp. 171–179. 3. Dan Vogel, “Mormonism’s ‘Anti-Masonick Bible,’ ” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 9 (1989): 17. 4. This is the theory to which I am partial, though the story it presents is no doubt apocryphal. See Rhett James, The Man Who Knew: Dramatic Biography of Martin Harris (Cache Valley, Utah: Martin Harris Pageant Committee, 1983). 5. Vogel, “Mormonism’s ‘Anti-Masonick Bible,’ ” pp. 17–19.

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6. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 65. Also see I. Woodbridge Riley, The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith Jr. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902), pp. 160–163. See Walter Franklin Prince, “Psychological Tests for the Authorship of the Book of Mormon,” American Journal of Psychology 28 (July 1917): 376–377; Samuel Goodwin, “Mormonism and Masonry–Anti-Masonry in the Book of Mormon,” The Builder 10 (November–December 1924): 363–364; Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (1957; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 35; Robert N. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism (St. Louis: Clayton, 1980), pp. 100–103; David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1985), pp. 176–179; Brent T. Metcalfe, “Theologizing the Treasure Trove: An Experiment in Book of Mormon Exegesis” (unpublished paper presented at the Sunstone Symposium, Salt Lake City, 1987); and Marvin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1989), p. 64. 7. Samuel Goodwin, Additional Studies in Mormonism and Masonry (Salt Lake City, 1927). This is a collection of various articles that first appeared in the Masonic periodical The Builder. 8. James C. Bilderback, “Masonry and Mormonism: Nauvoo Illinois, 1841–1847” (M.S. thesis, State University of Iowa, 1937), p. 85. 9. Painesville Telegraph, March 22, 1831, p. 2. 10. Cited in Scott Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 114. 11. Elmer Cecil McGavin, Mormonism and Masonry (Salt Lake City: Stevens and Wallis, 1947), p. 13. 12. Cited in Mervin B. Hogan, Mormonism and Masonry (New York: Allied Masonic Degrees, 1959), p. 12. Also see Stanley B. Kimball, “Heber C. Kimball and Family, the Nauvoo Years,” Brigham Young University Studies 15 (summer 1975): 458. 13. Sanford Porter, “Reminiscences, ca. 1872” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City); Thomas Steed, “The Life of Thomas Steed from his own Diary, 1826–1910” (Utah State University Library, Logan); Henry Larkin Southworth, “Journal, 1843–1846” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City). 14. Mervin B. Hogan, Mormon Involvement with Freemasonry on the Illinois and Iowa Frontier Between 1840–1846 (Salt Lake City: self-published, 1983), p. 39. 15. Mervin B. Hogan, Mormonism and Freemasonry: The Illinois Episode (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1980), pp. 286–287. 16. Note that Hyrum, Joseph Smith’s older brother, was a full-fledged member of Moriah Lodge No. 12, in Palmyra. 17. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 157. 18. In this connection, see ibid., as well as D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1994), pp. 583–586.

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19. D. Booth interview with William R. Kelly, cited in Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire, p. 365 n. 28. 20. Joseph Smith Jr., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1964), 4:551–552. 21. Rob Morris, “A Practical Synopsis of Masonic Law and Usage, Alphabetically Arranged for General Use,” addendum to Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), pp. 258–259. 22. Albert G. Mackey, A Text Book of Masonic Jurisprudence; Illustrating the Written and Unwritten Laws of Freemasonry (1859; reprint, New York: Clark and Maynard, 1868), p. 189. 23. Ivan J. Barrett, Joseph Smith and the Restoration: A History of the Church to 1846 (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1983), p. 510. 24. D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1987), pp. 11–14. Also see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971; reprint, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1973). 25. See Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:8–9. Although the rather orthodox Clegg contests any connection between true Masonry and magic, he notes that among French Masons a tradition of “Occult Freemasonry” arose that attempted to use magic to elucidate certain Masonic mysteries (2:610–613). 26. Quinn, Early Mormonism, pp. 56–58, 78–80. 27. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:259. 28. Barrett, Joseph Smith and the Restoration, p. 131. 29. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:175. 30. Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 78:1. 31. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:403. 32. Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1978), pp. 147–148; Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli, Yerushalmi, and Midrashic Literature (New York: Judaica, 1982), p. 207. 33. Jastrow, Dictionary, pp. 230–231. 34. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 69–72. 35. See Charles Grandison Finney, The Character, Claims, and Practical Workings of Freemasonry (Cincinnati: Western Tract and Book Society, 1869). 36. Morris, “A Practical Synopsis,” pp. 274–276. 37. In this connection, see Mackey, A Textbook of Masonic Jurisprudence, pp. 83–154. 38. See the court record in appendix A of Brodie, No Man Knows My History, pp. 427–429. 39. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:477. 40. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire, p. 158. 41. Quinn, Mormonism and the Magic World View, pp. 27–52.

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42. Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 115–118. 43. Robert Freke Gould, The History of Freemasonry: Its Antiquities, Symbols, Constitutions, Customs, Etc. (London: Thomas C. Jack, 1886), 5:93–94. 44. Bernard J. Stern, Lewis Henry Morgan: Social Evolutionist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), p. 16, cited in Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood, p. 98. 45. Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Rochester: Sage and Brother, 1851), p. 60. Also see his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1870). 46. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood, p. 104.

.  :     1. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 58. 2. A famous healing handkerchief that Smith blessed and gave to missionary Wilford Woodruff to heal the sick has a similar pattern to that shown in figure 20—which is, no doubt, a coincidence. Perhaps the handkerchief was put to good Masonic ritual use, too. For a reproduction of the handkerchief, see figure 85 in D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1987). 3. Albert G. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry (London: Griffin, 1873), pp. 68–69. 4. Gentlemen belonging to the Jerusalem Lodge, Jachin and Boaz; or an Authentic Key to the Door of Freemasonry, both Ancient and Modern. London, England, 1762. Reprint, Boston: Gilbert and Dean, 1803, p. 13. 5. All three names are derived from the biblical name Jubal (Genesis 4:21), a descendant of Cain. This word making is similar to that in the Book of Mormon. See my discussion of Book of Mormon name making in “The Roots of Early Mormonism: An Exegetical Inquiry” (M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, April 1990), pp. 49–92. 6. Jachin and Boaz, p. 34. 7. Cited in Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1984), p. 5. 8. See Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), pp. 60–72. 9. Anon., The Royal Arch of Enoch: The Thirteenth Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Egyptian Rite of Memphis (1880) (microfiche, Special Collections, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario), p. 64. 10. Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, p. 200. 11. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, pp. 185–186. 12. Rob Morris, “A Practical Synopsis of Masonic Law and Usage, Alphabetically Arranged for General Use,” addendum to Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 206.

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13. Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, p. 200. 14. See Milton V. Backman Jr., Joseph Smith’s First Vision (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1980), p. 167. 15. Morris, “A Practical Synopsis,” pp. 206–207. 16. Anon., The Royal Arch of Enoch, pp. 69–73. 17. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry, p. 33. 18. Thomas Smith Webb, private manuscript, published in Morris, “A Practical Synopsis,” pp. 290–292. 19. Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 129. 20. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry, p. 56. 21. See Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 55 ff. 22. John L. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic,” n Launching the “Extended Republic,” ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 273–377. 23. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 121. 24. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 44. 25. In this connection, see Jacob O. Doesburg, Freemasonry Illustrated (Chicago: Ezra R. Cook, 1886), p. 547. 26. Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, p. 206. 27. Morris, “A Practical Synopsis,” p. 213. 28. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: The Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 70. 29. Thomas Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion: A Manual of Royal Arch Masonry (Toronto: Masonic, n.d.), p. 66. 30. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 70. 31. Jachin and Boaz, pp. 16–17. 32. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 71. 33. Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion, pp. 98–99. 34. C. Jess Groesbeck, “The Smiths and Their Dreams and Visions,” Sunstone 12 (March 1988): 22–29. 35. For an illuminating defense of tree and river worship in Masonry, see Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 2:1049–1051. 36. Lucy Mack Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet and His Progenitors for Many Generations (1912; reprint, Independence, Mo.: Herald House, 1969), pp. 54–57. 37. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 6. 38. Scott Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 21.

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39. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 42. 40. Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion, p. 39. 41. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 2:864. 42. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 19. 43. Arthur Edward Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (New York: University, 1970), 1:3. 44. Salem Town, A System of Speculative Masonry (Salem, N.Y.: Dodd, 1822). 45. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871; reprint, Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1947), p. 642. 46. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 24. 47. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 2:701. 48. Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion, p. 102. 49. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 157. 50. Morris, “A Practical Synopsis,” pp. 263–264, 273–274. 51. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 65. 52. Tubaloth is the name of a Lamanite king in the Book of Helaman who leads a very successful open-air frontal assault against the Nephite capital of Zarahemla. His general, Coriantumr, is described as “a large and a mighty man,” which comes close to Josephus’s description of Tubal-Cain in his Antiquities of the Jews—the great love of apocalyptic Masonry. See William Whiston, trans. and ed., Josephus Complete Works, foreword William Sanford LaSor (Grand 1737; reprint, Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1981), p. 27. 53. Jachin and Boaz, p. 31. 54. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry, p. 323. 55. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 1:46–53. 56. Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, p. 198. 57. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 294. 58. See William Ellery Channing, “Remarks on Association,” in The Works of William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1875), pp. 138–139. 59. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, p. 318. 60. For the clearest example of this type of argument made by Smith’s Masonic contemporaries, see Henry Brown, A Narrative of the Anti-Masonick Excitement, in the Western Part of the State of New York, during the Years 1826, ’7,’8, and a Part of 1829 (Batavia, N.Y., 1829). Also see A. P. Bentley, History of the Abduction of William Morgan, and the Anti-Masonic Excitement of 1826–1830 (Mount Pleasant, Iowa, 1874). 61. Cited in Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, p. 304. 62. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 554. 63. Elmer Cecil McGavin, Mormonism and Masonry (Salt Lake City: Stevens and Wallis, 1947), pp. 49–56. See Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 2:209–211. Waite crit-

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icizes George Oliver, the English cleric and Christian Mason, for lacking discernment and for being influenced by what he calls “the conduits of Jacob Bryant, Faber, Higgins, Vallancey, and other makers of dreary Noachian myth . . . [that saw] Masonry everywhere as a firstborn of Holy Writ . . . the grand periods of which began with creation itself and reached their zenith at the building of King Solomon’s temple” (pp. 209–210). In this connection, also see D. W. Pike, Secret Societies: Their Origin, History and Ultimate Fate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 28–39. 64. Cited in Brodie, No Man Knows My History, p. vii.

.         :        ⁽  ⁾  1. Mrs. T. B. H. Stenhouse, Tell It All: The Tyranny of Mormonism, intro. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1880; reprint, Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur, 1971), p. 224. 2. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: The Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 110. 3. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 124. 4. Scott Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 32. 5. James Anderson, Constitutions of the Free Masons, containing the History, Charges, Regulations etc. of the most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity (London, 1723). 6. Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, p. 28. 7. See Sten Flygt, The Notorious Dr. Bahrdt (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1963), p. 254. 8. The testimony of the eight witnesses in the 1830 edition also identifies Smith as the “Author and Proprietor of this work.” 9. Alexander Campbell, Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon; with an Examination of the Internal and External Evidences (Boston: Joshua V. Himes, 1832). “And as Joseph Smith is a very ignorant man and is called the author on the title page,” Campbell writes, “I cannot doubt for a single moment that he is the sole author and proprietor of it” (pp. 19–20). 10. Russell R. Rich, “The Dogberry Papers and the Book of Mormon,” Brigham Young University Studies 10 (spring 1970): 314–320. 11. Donald Harman Akenson, Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), p. 24. 12. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1961). 13. John Kenneth Kuntz, The People of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Old Testament Literature, History, and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 49.

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14. In this connection, see Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Lives, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (New York: Paulist, 1979). 15. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100–600, vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of Christian Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 18, 31. 16. Preface to Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Now First Correctly Reprinted From the Original Edition of 1719, With Introduction by William Lee Esq. (London: Fredrick Warne, 1869), i. 17. David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 123. 18. Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1968), pp. 50–76. 19. Cited in Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, p. 199. 20. Allene Stuart Phy, “Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told,” in The Bible and Popular Culture in America, ed. Allene Stuart Phy (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), pp. 43–44. 21. Orasmus Turner, “Origin of the Mormon Imposture,” Littel’s Living Age 30 (July–September 1851): 429–431. 22. Arthur E. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (New York: University, 1970), 1:465. 23. Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, pp. 59–88. 24. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood, p. 124.

.         1. Melodie Moench Charles, “Precedents for Mormon Women from Scriptures,” in Sisters in Spirit, ed. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 49. 2. Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 25. See Jill Mulvay Derr, Janath Russell Cannon, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Women of Covenant: The Story of the Relief Society (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1992), p. 10. 3. Charles, “Precedents for Mormon Women,” p. 50. 4. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: The Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 278. 5. Charles, “Precedents for Mormon Women,” p. 50. 6. Carol Lynn Pearson, “Could Feminism Have Saved the Nephites?” (unpublished paper presented at the Sunstone Symposium, Salt Lake City, August 1993), p. 3. 7. Lynn Matthews Anderson, “The Book of Mormon as a Feminist Resource” (paper presented at the Sunstone Symposium, Salt Lake City, August 1993), p. 7. 8. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 315.

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9. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 180. 10. [Abigail Stickney Lyon], Observations on Free Masonry; with a Masonic Vision, Addressed, by a Lady In Worcester, to Her Female Friend (Worcester, Mass., 1798), pp. 4–8. 11. Sally Sayward Barrell Wood, Julia and the Illuminated Baron . . . (Portsmouth, N.H., 1800), pp. viii–ix, 284. Also see David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of CounterSubversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (September 1960): 207. 12. Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones, Early Masonic Pamphlets (Manchester, England, 1945), pp. 158–159. 13. Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 82. 14. Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789–1835 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 330. 15. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 60–104. 16. Cited in Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic, p. 101. 17. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 19. 18. Rob Morris, “A Practical Synopsis of Masonic Law and Usage, Alphabetically Arranged for General Use,” addendum to Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), p. 276. 19. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 194. 20. See Malcolm C. Duncun, Duncan’s Masonic Ritual and Monitor (Chicago: Ezra A. Cook, n.d.), p. 257. 21. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871; reprint, Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1947), p. 88. 22. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 315. 23. Henry Leonard Stillson and William James Hughan, History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders (New York: Fraternity, 1891), p. 858. 24. Mrs. T. B. H. Stenhouse, Tell It All: The Tyranny of Mormonism, intro. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1880; reprint, Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur, 1971), pp. 189–201. 25. Arthur E. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (New York: University, 1970), 1:4.

.          1. Wesley P. Walters, “The Use of the Old Testament in the Book of Mormon” (M.T. thesis, Covenant Theological Seminary, 1981).

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2. Jacob quotes Isaiah 49:22–23 verbatim (2 Nephi 6:6–7, p. 74), and Isaiah 49:23–52:2 (2 Nephi 6:15–8:25, pp. 75–78). He emphasizes restoration, focusing on the issue of the “righteous branch.” 3. The Book of Mormon Jesus quotes Isaiah 52:9–10, 7, 11–15; Micah 5:8–11; Isaiah 54:1–17; and Malachi 3, 4. 4. Aaron, Abel, Abraham, Adam, Aha, Ahaz, Aiath, Alpha, Amalekites, Aminadab, Ammah, Ammon, Ammonites, Amos, Amoz, Anathoth, Antipas, Arabian, Arpad, Assyria, Babylon, Bashan, Benjamin, Bethabara, Cain, Calno, Carchemish, Chaldeans, Chaldee, Christ, Cush, Damascus, David, Eden, Edom, Egypt, Elam, Elijah, Enos, Ephraim, Esrom, Ether, Eve, Gad, Galilee, Gallim, Geba, Gebim, Gibeah, Gentiles, Gideon, Gilead, Gilgal, Gomorrah, Hamath, Helam, Helem, Heth, Horeb, Immanuel, Isaac, Isaiah, Ishmael, Israel, Jacob, Jared, Jeberechiah, Jehovah, Jeremiah, Jerusalem, Jesse, Jesus, Jews, John, Jonas, Jordan, Joseph, Joshua, Jotham, Judea, Judah, Kish, Laban, Laish, Leah, Lebanon, Lehi, Lemuel, Levi, Lucifer, Madmenah, Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, Malachi, Mary, Mammon, Medes, Melchizedek, Messiah, Michmash, Midian, Migron, Moab, Moses, Naphtali, Nazareth, Nimrah, Nimrod, Noah, Nob, Omega, Omer, Ophir, Oreb, Palestina, Pathros, Pekah, Pharaoh, Philistines, Raca, Rahab, Ramah, Ramath, Remaliah, Rezin, Salem, Samaria, Samuel, Sarah, Satan, Saul, Seth, Shearjashub, Shem, Shiloah, Shinar, Sidon, Sinim, Sodom, Solomon, Syria, Tabeal, Tarshish, Timothy, Uriah, Uzziah, Zebulon, Zechariah, Zedekiah, Zion. 5. John A. Tvedtnes, “A Phonemic Analysis of Nephite and Jaredite Proper Names,” TVE-77 (Prove, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1977), p. 2. 6. Blake T. Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20 (spring 1987): 110. 7. John R. Krueger, An Analysis of the Names of Mormonism (Bloomingdale, Ind.: Selbstverlag, 1979), p. 18. 8. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 73. 9. See my discussion in “The Roots of Early Mormonism: An Exegetical Inquiry” (M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, April 1990), pp. 49–92. 10. Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), p. 28. 11. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 50. 12. The seed referred to in Genesis 7:3 is not vegetable but animal, from the Hebrew zera‘, which means “offspring.” See Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1978), p. 282. 13. Albert G. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry (London: Griffin, 1873), p. 18.

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14. Arthur E. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (New York: University, 1970), 1:62, 189. 15. Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies (London: Muller, 1961), p. 96b. 16. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 69. 17. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry, p. 231. 18. Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 2:714. 19. See Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 77. 20. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 315. See Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, pp. 124–126. 21. Alexander Slade, The Freemason Examin’d (London: P. Griffiths, n.d.), p. 12. 22. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: The Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 553–554. 23. Cited in Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 1:23. 24. G. S. Faber, The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (London, 1816). 25. The Rev. George Oliver published seventeen books of his own, editing three others. His pre-1830 publications consist of The Antiquities of Freemasonry, comprising illustrations of the five Grand Periods of Masonry, from the Creation of the World to the Dedication of King Solomon’s Temple (1823) and The Star in the East (London, 1823). For a full bibliography, see Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 2:210–211. 26. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 2:922.

.             1. Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 2:1029. 2. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: The Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 8. 3. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia2:980. 4. See Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1978), pp. 526–527. 5. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871; reprint, Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1947), p. 797. 6. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 11. 7. Rob Morris, “A Practical Synopsis of Masonic Law and Usage, Alphabetically Arranged for General Use,” addendum to Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), p. 276.

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8. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 158. 9. Ritual described in Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies (London: Muller, 1961), p. 133. 10. Albert G. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry (London: Griffin, 1873), p. 56. 11. Thomas Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion: A Manual of Royal Arch Masonry (Toronto: Masonic, n.d.), p. 103. 12. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 13. 13. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry, p. 56, 14. Alexander Slade, The Freemason Examin’d (London: P. Griffiths, n.d.), pp. 9, 11, 13. 15. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 12. 16. Henry Leonard Stillson and William James Hughan, History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders (New York: Fraternity, 1891), p. 736. 17. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 14. 18. Stillson and Hughan, Concordant Orders, p. 736. 19. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 11. 20. Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), pp. 173–174. 21. See William Whiston, trans. and ed., Josephus’ Complete Works (1737), foreword William Sanford LaSor (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1981), p. 237. 22. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 176. 23. Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion, p. 88. 24. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 10. Emphasis added. 25. George Oliver, The Book of the Lodge 3d ed. (1864; reprint, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1986), p. 48 n. 7. 26. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 39. 27. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia, 1:237. 28. Though I once thought so. In this connection, see my “King-men or Free-men? The Book of Mormon and the Dilemma of Canadian Mormonism,” The Third Eye: The Canadian Journal of Mormon Studies 1 (1996): 114–145. 29. Oliver, The Book of the Lodge, p. 37. 30. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 172. 31. Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion, p. 91. 32. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 172. 33. Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion, p. 121. 34. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 172. 35. Sargant, The Royal Arch Companion, p. 122. 36. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 69. 37. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 190. 38. Gentlemen belonging to the Jerusalem Lodge, Jachin and Boaz; or an Authentic Key to

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the Door of Freemasonry, both Ancient and Modern (London, England, 1762; reprint, Boston: Gilbert and Dean, 1803), p. 35. 39. See Stillson and Hughan, Concordant Orders, pp. 764–766. 40. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, pp. 179–189. 41. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 182.

.    ⁽  ⁾  1. Robert N. Hullinger, Joseph Smith’s Response to Skepticism (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1992), p. xv. 2. In this connection, see Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 29, 134, 151–153, 163–164. 3. Albert G. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry (London: Griffin, 1873), p. 271. 4. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: The Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 508. 5. See Isaiah 63:3 and Revelation 14:20, 19:13. 6. Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), pp. 191–192. 7. Anon., United Orders of the Temple and Malta: Rituals of the Sovereign Great Priory. . . . 1878 (n.p., 1878), p. 61. 8. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, pp. 470–505. 9. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry, p. 129. 10. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, p. 186. 11. In this connection, see Joseph Bates Noble, “Reminiscences,” 1836 (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City); Rebecca Swain Williams, “Letter, June 1834, Kirtland Mills [Ohio] to Isaac Swain, Youngstown [sic] New York” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City); Lewis Barney, “Reminiscences,” 1888 (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City), p. 2; and Charles W. Wandell, “Open letter of Charles W. Wandell to the President of the United States” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City). 12. Clyde R. Forsberg Jr., “In Search of the Historical Nephi: The Book of Mormon, ‘Evangelicalisms’ and Antebellum American Popular Culture, c. 1830” (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, 1994). 13. Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 44. 14. Gordon D. Pollock, “In Search of Security: The Mormons and the Kingdom of God on Earth” (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, 1977), pp. 268 ff. 15. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. x.

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16. Jan Shipps and John W. Welch, eds., The Journals of William E. McLellin, 1831–1836 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 17. Gordon Pollock, “Me, You, Mark Hofmann and William E. McLellin,” Canadian Mormon Studies Newsletter 1 (autumn 1995): 3–4. 18. David W. R. Plaxton, “Emergence of an Ethos? Revivalisms and Evangelicalisms in the Northern United States, 1800–1860” (M.A. thesis, Queen’s University, 1992). Also see Newell G. Bringhurst, “Joseph Smith, the Mormons, and Antebellum Reform—A Closer Look” (paper presented at the John Whitmer Historical Association Annual Meeting, Independence, Mo., 1993). 19. Richard Carwardine, Trans-Atlantic Revivalism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978). 20. B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 84–126. 21. See Ezekiel 37:17, which Mormons interpret as a prophecy of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. In this connection, see LeGrand Richards, A Marvelous Work and a Wonder (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1975), pp. 66–68. 22. Brigham Young, The Discourses of Brigham Young, ed. John A. Widstoe (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1977), pp. 126–127. 23. Richard T. Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 24. See Richard L. Bushman, “The Book of Mormon in Early Mormon History,” in New Views of Mormon History: Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Arrington, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), pp. 3–18.

.            ’   1. In this connection, see Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 2. Timothy Dwight, Theology; Explained and Defended, in a Series of Sermons, with a Memoir of the Life of the Author (Middletown, Conn.: Clark and Lyman, 1818–1819), sermon 8, 1:138. 3. Nathaniel W. Taylor, Practical Sermons (New York: Clark, Austin, and Smith, 1858), p. 406. 4. Quarterly Christian Spectator 4, no. 6 (June 1822): 303. 5. William Ellery Channing, The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1903), p. 380.

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6. Lyman Beecher, “Lyman Beecher to N. S. S. Beeman, January 1827,” in Letters of the Rev. Dr. Beecher and Rev. Mr. Nettleton on the “New Measures” in Conducting Revivals of Religion (New York, 1828), p. 98 ff. 7. See Albert Baldwin Dodd’s attacks, published under the titles “Finney’s Sermons” and “Finney’s Lectures” in Biblical Repertory and Theological Review 7 (July 1835): 482–527; (October 1835): 626–674. 8. For a concise summary of Finney’s life and works, see William G. McLoughlin’s introduction in Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William G. McLoughlin (1835; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. vii–lii. 9. Charles Grandison Finney, Memoirs (New York, 1876), p. 34. 10. Sect. 2:1–12, in The Pearl of Great Price, addendum to Doctrine and Covenants. 11. Alexander Campbell, The Christian System, ed. Edwin S. Gaustad (New York: Arno, 1969), pp. 3–5. 12. Robert C. Whittemore, The Transformation of the New England Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 241–288. 13. Campbell, The Christian System, p. 28. 14. Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1953), pp. 209–210. 15. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: The Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 65. 16. For a firsthand account of Sidney Rigdon’s association and quarrel with Alexander Campbell and subsequent conversion to Mormonism, see Hans Rollman, “The Early Baptist Career of Sidney Rigdon in Warren, Ohio,” Brigham Young University Studies 21 (winter 1981): 37–50. 17. Cited in Dale R. Stoffer, “Background and Development of Brethren Doctrines,” in Brethren Encyclopedia (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren, 1989), p. 109. 18. I discuss these parallels at length in “The Roots of Early Mormonism: An Exegetical Inquiry” (M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, April 1990), pp. 238–241. 19. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, pp. 160–161. 20. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. 7th American ed. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), chap. 4, par. 16. 21. Cited in Ernest Cassara, Universalism in America: A Documentary History (Boston: Beacon, 1971), pp. 53–54. 22. Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), pp. 124–125. 23. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 46. 24. Arthur E. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (New York: University, 1970), 2:331. 25. Henry Leonard Stillson and William James Hughan, History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders (New York: Fraternity, 1891), pp. 145–146.

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26. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 2:333. 27. George Oliver, The Book of the Lodge, 3d ed. (1864; reprint, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1986), p. 176. 28. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 2:39. 29. Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 68:27. 30. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871; reprint, Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1947), p. 92. 31. Klaus J. Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of the Fifty (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967).

.   :       1. For a discussion of the antithetical relationship between Universalism and Evangelicalism, see Curtis D. Johnson, Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York, 1790–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 21, 68, 97–100, 170n, 171n. 2. Grant Underwood, “ ‘Saved and Damned’: Tracing a Persistent Protestantism in Early Mormon Thought,” Brigham Young University Studies 25 (summer 1985): 85–103. 3. Dan Vogel, “Anti-Universalist Rhetoric in the Book of Mormon,” in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology, ed. Brent T. Metcalfe (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1992), pp. 21–52. 4. Sarah Studevant Leavitt, “History of Sarah Studevant Leavitt from her Journal, 1799–1847” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City), p. 1. 5. Milo Andrus, “Journal of Milo Andrus, 1814–1893” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City). 6. Oren Jefferds, “Reminiscences and diary, 1856–1864” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City). 7. James Allen Browning, “Autobiography, ca. 1851–1883” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City). 8. Benjamin Brown, Testimonies for the Truth (Liverpool, 1853), pp. 4–5. 9. Thomas Steed, “The Life of Thomas Steed, from his own diary, 1826–1910” (Utah State University Library, Logan). 10. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: The Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 78. 11. In Smith’s more mature cosmology, three postmortem apportionments are listed, not counting perdition (the everlasting hell of orthodox Christianity reserved exclusively for the devil and his angels): the telestial world (the habitation of incorrigible sinners), the terrestrial world (the habitation of those who die without law, honorable souls blinded by the craftiness of men), and finally the celestial world (the abode of baptized saints who come forth in the first resurrection). In the Book of Mormon, there are not three worlds as such but three mental states: the limbo of innocent children and

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heathen, the purgatory of the sometimes disobedient, and the psychological paradise of the righteous. The wicked get a taste of hell, banished to outer darkness to live under the spell of the eternally disembodied until the resurrection. They are temporary devils. Alma explains: “And then shall it come to pass that the spirits of the wicked, yea, which are evil; for behold, they have no part nor portion of the spirit of the Lord; for behold they choose evil works, rather than good; therefore the spirit of the Devil did enter into them, and take possession of their house; and these shall be cast out into outer darkness” (pp. 334–335; emphasis added). The “spirits of the wicked” and those who are “evil” are not the same. The latter “have no portion of the spirit of the Lord,” and their mental anguish is simply “because of their own iniquity.” Section 76 of Doctrine and Covenants assigns the former a “telestial” world whose glory is comparable to the stars, the latter a terrestrial world whose glory is comparable to the moon, in stark contrast to the celestial world, the abode of the righteous and whose glory is comparable to the sun. Postmillennial apportionments are clearly final. Moreover, those who die without law, the spirits kept in prison whom Jesus visited, the sometimes disobedient, are, alas, cut off from the Father. 12. An addendum to Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 137, canonized in 1976 together with a similar revelation ascribed to Joseph F. Smith, dated 1918 and now section 138. 13. Vogel has distorted the Book of Mormon discussion by suggesting that hell is always referred to “as ‘unquenchable fire’ and ‘a lake of fire and brimstone’ (Jacob 6:10; 2 Ne. 28:23;9:16; Mosiah 2:38; 3:27; 26:27; Alma 5:52; Moro. 9:5)” (“Anti-Universalist Rhetoric,” p. 45). 14. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 159. 15. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 95–99. 16. Arthur E. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (New York: University, 1970), 1:92, 385; 2:146. 17. In this connection, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 474. 18. Cited in D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 21. 19. Westminster Confession of Faith (1690; reprint, Lochcarron Ross-shire, Scotland: Publications Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1976), pp. 123–126. 20. Walker, The Decline of Hell, p. 69. 21. Dolphus Skinner, A Discussion of the Doctrines of Endless Misery and Universal Salvation in an Epistolary Correspondence Between Alexander Campbell and Dolphus Skinner (Utica, 1840). 22. Grant Underwood, “The Millenarian World of Mormonism” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), p. 293. 23. In this connection, see Blake T. Ostler, “The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15 (spring 1982): 59 ff.

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24. See John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures, in Works, 12th ed. (London, 1824), 6:4–10; and William Whiston, The Eternity of Hell Torments Considered; or, A Collection of texts and Scripture, and Testimonies of the first three Centuries, relating to them (London, 1740). 25. Jeremiah White, The Restoration of All Things; or, A Vindication of the Goodness and Grace of God, To be Manifested at last in the RECOVERY of his Whole creation out of their FALL (London, 1712). 26. Peter Sterry, The Rise, Race, and Royalty (London, 1740), p. 52. 27. Peter Sterry, unpublished manuscript in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, p. 115. 28. Colin Wilson, The Occult (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 277–278. 29. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 334. 30. See, for example, Marvin S. Hill, “Quest for Refuge: An Hypothesis as to the Social Origins and Nature of the Mormon Political Kingdom,” Journal of Mormon History 2 (1975): 3–20. 31. Emanuel Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion (1771; reprint, London: Swedenborg Society, 1921), p. 540. 32. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, pp. 37–38. 33. Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion, p. 548. 34. Mark Thomas, “Revivalist Language in the Book of Mormon,” Sunstone 8 (May–June 1983): 19–25. 35. Alan P. F. Sell, The Great Debate: Calvinism, Arminianism and Salvation (Worcester, England: Billing, 1982), p. 114. 36. Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion, p. 543. 37. Sell, The Great Debate, pp. 59–87. 38. Hosea Ballou, Nine Sermons (Philadelphia: Abel C. Thomas, 1835), pp. 107–108. 39. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, 337. 40. See Confession 1.9 and Apologia 4.51, cited in Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (London: Nelson, 1883), 3:604. 41. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 582. 42. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:28–30. 43. Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion, p. 771.

. -   ‒  -  1. Sterling B. McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1965), pp. 2–3. 2. Christian Palladium, January 16, 1837, p. 275; September 1, 1837, p. 138. 3. B. H. Roberts, Mormon Doctrine of Deity (Salt Lake City: Zion Book Store, 1903). 4. See Blake T. Ostler, “The Mormon Concept of God,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 17 (summer 1984): 65–93.

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5. Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 92–93. 6. Mark Thomas, “Listening to a Voice from the Dust: An Introduction to the Book of Mormon” (unpublished paper given to author). 7. In this connection, see the Mormon response to the anti-Mormon film The Godmakers in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (summer 1985): 14–39, which presents essays by Randall L. Mackey and others under the heading “The Godmakers Examined.” 8. O. Kendall White, Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy: A Crisis Theology (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1987), p. xix. 9. Thomas G. Alexander, “The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine: From Joseph Smith to Progressive Theology,” Sunstone 5 (July–August 1980), 24–33; Edgar T. Lyon, “Doctrinal Development of the Church During the Nauvoo Sojourn,” Brigham Young University Studies 15 (summer 1975): 435–446. 10. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 11. Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe, Understanding Cults and New Religions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1986), p. 56. 12. Melodie Moench Charles, “Book of Mormon Christology,” in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology, ed. Brent T. Metcalfe (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1993), p. 103 13. See Jerald Tanner and Sandra Tanner, Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? (Salt Lake City: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1987), pp. 163–172b. 14. See Dan Vogel, Religious Seekers and the Advent of Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1988), p. 177 n. 48; idem, “The Earliest Mormon Concept of God,” in Line Upon Line, ed. Gary James Bergera (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1989), pp. 17–33. 15. Clyde R. Forsberg Jr., “The Roots of Early Mormonism: An Exegetical Inquiry” (M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, April 1990), pp. 204–205. 16. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 160. 17. See Harold O. J. Brown, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1984), pp. 328–331. 18. Michael Servetus, The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity: On the Errors of the Trinity, ed. Earl Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), p. 200. 19. Brigham Young, “Self-Government . . . ,” Journal of Discourses 1 (April 1852): 50. 20. Cited in Charles, “Book of Mormon Christology,” pp. 110–111. 21. Vogel, “The Earliest Mormon Concept of God,” p. 29. 22. George B. Arbaugh, Revelation in Mormonism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932). 23. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 96–128.

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24. George Oliver, The Book of the Lodge 3d ed. (1864; reprint, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1986), p. 32. 25. Linda P. Wilcox, “The Mormon Concept of a Mother in Heaven,” in Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, ed. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson, foreword Jan Shipps (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 64. 26. Blake T. Ostler, “The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15 (spring 1982): 59–60. See T. Edgar Lyon, “Doctrinal Development of the Church During the Nauvoo Sojourn,” Brigham Young University Studies 15 (summer 1975): 437–439; and Marvin S. Hill, “The Shaping of the Mormon Mind in New England and New York,” Brigham Young University Studies 9 (spring 1969): 351–372. 27. Doctrine and Covenants, sects. 42:61; 59:4. Cf. Joseph Smith Jr., The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1977), p. 61. 28. Van Hale, “The Doctrinal Impact of the King Follett Discourse,” Brigham Young University Studies 18 (winter 1978): 209–232. See Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 366. Brodie also argues that the King Follett Discourse was the first unified discourse of themes that had appeared in fragments until then. 29. Robert Paul, “Joseph Smith and the Plurality of Worlds Idea,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19 (summer 1986): 29. See Van Hale, “Mormons and Moonmen,” Sunstone 7 (September–October 1982): 12–17; and James B. Allen, “But Dick Tracy Landed on the Moon,” Sunstone 7 (September–October 1982): 18–19. 30. Thomas Chalmers’s A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation Viewed in Connection with the Modern Astronomy (1817) was by far the most influential Christian work to espouse astronomical pluralism. In America, none other than Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, disseminated astronomical pluralism in his famous 1818 treatise Theology; Explained and Defended. Thomas Dick’s 1828 work The Philosophy of a Future State was also extremely influential in this regard. However, the idea of a plurality of gods was never thought to follow from the idea of a plurality of worlds. For more on this, see Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900: The Idea of the Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 31. I discuss the impact of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason in “The Roots of Early Mormonism,” pp. 256–294. 32. J. Frederick Voros Jr., “Was the Book of Mormon Buried with King Follett?” Sunstone 11 (March 1987): 17. 33. Plotinus, “The Fifth Ennead,” in Great Western Books of the Western World (1952; reprint, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1984), pp. 17, 208–251. 34. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 126–132.

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35. Douglas Elwood, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 6. 36. Cited in Robert C. Whittemore, The Transformation of the New England Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), p. 58. 37. An extract from the Book of Moses appears in The Pearl of Great Price, addendum to Doctrine and Covenants. See Joseph Smith Jr., Inspired Version: The Holy Scriptures Containing the Old and New Testaments; An Inspired Revision of the Authorized Version. Independence, Mo.: Herald, 1944), pp. 1–28. 38. This was a commonplace notion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christian thought. Its origins can be traced to Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontanelle’s seventeenth-century work On the Plurality of Worlds. The Book of Moses is reminiscent of William Whiston’s 1755 treatise Theory of the Earth, which says that Moses was aware of God’s other creations. For more on this, see Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 243–245. See also Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), chap. 4. 39. See John Hick, Evil and Suffering and the God of Love (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 37–89, 169–200. 40. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, pp. 63–64. 41. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871; reprint, Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1947), p. 525. 42. Westminster Confession of Faith (1690; reprint, Lochcarron Ross-shire, Scotland: Publications Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1976), p. 27. 43. Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 566. 44. This is taken from p. 211 of the edition of Doctrine and Covenants published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1835. This is now section 93:32–34 of the 1977 edition. 45. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon Cook, eds., The Words of Joseph Smith, BYU Religious Studies Monograph (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1980), p. 60. 46. Cited in Ostler, “The Idea of Pre-Existence,” p. 63. 47. These works can be found in Orson Pratt, Writings of an Apostle: Orson Pratt (Salt Lake City: Mormon Heritage, 1976). 48. Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 669. 49. Boyd Kirkland, “Elohim and Jehovah in Mormonism and the Bible,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19 (spring 1986): 77. 50. Ostler, “The Idea of Pre-Existence,” p. 61. 51. Leland H. Gentry, “What of the Lectures on Faith?” Brigham Young University Studies 19 (fall 1978): 5–12. 52. This is now LDS Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 130:22. 53. Gentry, “What of the Lectures on Faith,” pp. 18–19. For more on the Lectures on Faith, see Joseph Smith Jr., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1964), 2:176,

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180. The committee that decided to remove the Lectures on Faith from the Mormon canon included Joseph Fielding Smith, John A. Widstoe, and James E. Talmage. Joseph Fielding defended the committee’s decision to remove the lectures, emphasizing that it was not because “they contained false doctrine” but because they were “not now considered, and were not considered when they were placed in the Doctrine and Covenants, on a par with the revelations.” See Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1977), 2:303–304; see also 3:194. 54. This is usually said to refer to creation, but it may refer to God. The modern version interpolates a semicolon that was not part of the early version. 55. N. B. Lundwall, A Compilation Containing the Lectures on Faith . . . (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, n.d.), p. 13, 35, 36, 43. 56. Note the perfectionist tone of paragraph 15, which says: It is scarcely necessary here to observe what we have previously noticed, that the glory which the Father and the Son have is because they are just and holy beings; and that if they were lacking in one attribute or perfection which they have, the glory which they have never could be enjoyed by them, for it requires them to be precisely what they are in order to enjoy it; and if the Savior gives this glory to any others, he must do it in the very way set forth in his prayer to his Father—by making them one with him as he and the Father are one. (p. 66) Cf. Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 2:1068, which states: “The famous secret of the mysteries was the unity of God.” 57. Cotton Mather’s discussion of the Trinity in his essay entitled “Of Man,” reprinted in The Christian Philosopher, ed., intro., and ann. Winton U. Solberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 236–318, is a case in point. 58. Ehat and Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith, p. 351. 59. Ostler, “The Idea of Pre-Existence,” p. 61. 60. Kirkland, “Elohim and Jehovah,” p. 78. 61. Louis C. Zucker, “Joseph Smith as a Student of Hebrew,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (summer 1968): 41–55. 62. Donald Q. Cannon, “The King Follett Discourse: Joseph Smith’s Greatest Sermon in Historical Perspective,” Brigham Young University Studies 18 (winter 1978): 179–192. 63. Ostler, “The Idea of Pre-Existence,” p. 62. 64. Smith, The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 181; see also p. 312. 65. Doctrine and Covenants, sects. 130:22, 131:7. 66. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 7, 10–12, 15, 23–24, 27–28, 70, 72, 92, 94, 101, 107, 112, 128, 205–207, 215, 274, 278. 67. Alan Sell, Theology in Turmoil (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1986), p. 18.

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68. This is G. P. Fisher’s assessment in A History of Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1949), p. 510. 69. Sell, Theology in Turmoil, pp. 18–20. 70. The materialist strain in Mormonism is discussed by Sterling B. McMurrin in his Philosophical Foundations of Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1959), pp. 17–18, 20. 71. Note what Smith says in this connection: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. . . . I say, if you were to see him to-day, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves, in all the person, image, and very form as man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image, and likeness of God.” Smith goes on to say that “we have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I want to refute that idea. . . . God himself the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did. . . . The Scriptures informs us that Jesus said, ‘As the Father hath power in himself, even so hath the Son power’—to do what? Why, what the Father did. The answer is obvious—in a manner, to lay down his body and take it up again” (“Character and Being of God . . . ,” Journal of Discourses 6 [1859]: 3). See Stan Larson, “The King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text,” Brigham Young University Studies 18 (winter 1978): 193–208. 72. Smith, “Character and Being of God . . . ,” p. 4. 73. Smith, The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 371. Smith goes on to defend this by referring to his plural translation of the Hebrew word for God. Some say I do not interpret the Scripture the same as they do. They say it means the heathen gods. Paul says there are Gods many and Lords many; and that makes a plurality of Gods. . . . You know and I testify that Paul had no allusion to the heathen gods in the text. I will show from the Hebrew Bible that I am correct, and the first word shows a plurality of Gods. . . . It read first, “In the beginning the head of the Gods brought forth the Gods.” . . . In the very beginning the Bible shows there is a plurality of Gods beyond the power of refutation. . . . The word Eloheim ought to be in the plural all the way through—Gods. The heads of the Gods appointed one God for us. (pp. 371–372) 74. The fact that Smith believes the Bible teaches this doctrine is extremely important. Note what he says in this regard: I will preach on the plurality of Gods. I have selected this text [Revelation 1:6] for that express purpose. I wish to declare that I have always and in all congregations when I preached on the subject of the Deity, it has been the plurality of Gods. . . . I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit: and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods. . . . Our text says, “And hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Fa-

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ther.” The Apostles have discovered that there were Gods above, for John says God was the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. My object was to preach the scriptures, and preach the doctrine they contain, there being a God above, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . John was one of the men, and apostles declare they were made kings and priests unto God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It reads just so in the Revelation, [sic] Hence the doctrine of a plurality of Gods is as prominent in the Bible as any other doctrine. (ibid., p. 370) 75. Revelation 1:6, in Smith, Inspired Version. 76. Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 666. 77. See Gary Bergera, “The Orson Pratt–Brigham Young Controversies,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13 (summer 1980): 7–49. See also Brigham Young, “Salvation,” Journal of Discourses 1 (January 1853): 1–6; “Perfection and Salvation,” Journal of Discourses 2 (December 1853): 135; “To Know God . . . ,” Journal of Discourses 4 (February 1857): 216; “Truth . . . ,” Journal of Discourses 6 (November 1857): 31; “Intelligence, Etc.,” Journal of Discourses 7 (October 1859): 285; “Source of Intelligence . . . ,” Journal of Discourses 8 (October 1860): 205; “Eternal Existence . . . ,” Journal of Discourses 10 (September 1862): 5. Young, it appears, had no regard for the unity of God in his conceptions of God, whereas Pratt did. Pratt maintained that human souls were contingent, dependent on God for existence, whereas Young vacillated. Also see Boyd Kirkland, “Of Gods, Mortals, and Devils: Eternal Progression and the Second Death in the Theology of Brigham Young,” Sunstone 10 (December 1985): 6–12. 78. Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 701.

.   :        1. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 123–132. 2. In this connection, see R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner’s, 1955); and idem, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1957). 3. Coming at the end of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation predates the Gospel of John. 4. Tertullian, Apology 39.2, cited in Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, p. 131. 5. Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, p. 131. 6. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1961). 7. See Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: Uni-

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versity of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 11–23. On the Millerites, see LeRoy Edwin Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 4 vols. (Washington: Review and Herald, 1950). 8. In this connection, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 464–489. 9. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (London: Nelson, 1883), 3:790–868. 10. Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 131–132. 11. See Michael P. Baxter, The Coming Battle (London, 1860); and idem, Louis Napoleon, the Destined Monarch of the World and Personal Anti-Christ (Philadelphia, 1866). Baxter combined elements of historicism with a secret rapture. The same eclectic temperament is evident in the first publication of the Prophetic Times. See Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 95–97. 12. In this connection, see Leonard I. Sweet, “Millennialism in America: Recent Studies,” Theological Studies 40 (1979), 510–531; Hillel Swartz, “The End of the Beginning: Millenarianism Studies, 1969–1975,” Religious Studies Review 2 (1976): 1–15. See also Anthony F. C. Wallace, “Revitalization Movements,” American Anthropologists 58 (1956), 264–281; Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1957); Vittorio Lanternari, Religions of the Oppressed (New York: Knopf, 1963); Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: Norton, 1965); Sylvia Thrupp, ed., Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in Comparative History (New York: Schocken, 1970); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); and Guenter Lewry, Religion and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). These are among the better-known deprivation theories. 13. Bloch, Visionary Republic, p. 151. 14. Herman Husband, Continuation of the Impartial Relations of the First Rise and the Cause of the Recent Differences in Publick Affairs (New Bern, N.C., 1770); idem, The Continental Almanac, for the Year of Our Lord, 1780 (Philadelphia, 1779). See also Mark H. Jones, “Herman Husband: Millenarian, Carolina Regulator, and Whiskey Rebel” (Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1982). 15 Christopher Love, Prophecies of the Reverend Christopher Love (Boston, 1793). 16. Whitby’s influence cannot be overstated. See Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968), pp. 39–41, 138–139. Whitby maintained that the first resurrection was spiritual not physical. He also renounced the doctrine of Christ’s personal reign on earth during the millennium, arguing instead that God’s plan of salvation was accomplished by “social progress.” 17. George Stanley Faber, William Cuninghame, James Hartley Frere, Joseph Frey, and Joseph Wolff are some of the names associated with this trend (ibid, pp. 8–12). See Faber’s Dissertations on the Seals and Trumpets of the Apocalypse (London, 1813) and Effusion of the Fifth Apocalyptic Vial (London, 1815); and Wolff’s Missionary Journal and Memoir (London, 1827) and Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff (London, 1861).

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Some of the odd beliefs associated with British and American premillennialism include the whereabouts of the lost ten tribes and the alleged Hebraic origin of the American Indians. For a good discussion of the Mormon contribution in this regard, see Dan Vogel, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1986). 18. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium. 19. Like many budding premillennialists at the time, Irving prayed for the return of the apostolic gifts of healing and speaking in tongues. The charismatic eccentricities of his London congregation shocked the general public, however, and Irving was disgraced as a consequence. He died shortly thereafter while on a preaching tour in Scotland in 1834. 20. Darby was certainly not the only Protestant theologian at the time to challenge Historicism—or “the Protestant interpretation,” as it was called. Samuel R. Maitland’s 1826 work entitled Enquiry into the Grounds on Which the Prophetic Period of Daniel and St. John Has Been Supposed to Consist of 1260 Years (London) was equally critical of Historicism. Moreover, Lacunza’s treatise proffered a futurist interpretation of prophecy. As for Darby’s secret, pretribulation rapture, there is some disagreement as to its true origin. Samuel Tregelles, another member of the Plymouth Brethren, alleged that it was the fruit of Irving’s charismatic meetings, whereas another theory is that Darby stole it from a Scottish charismatic by the name of Margaret Macdonald. For more on the Macdonald-Darby connection, see David McPherson, The Incredible Cover-Up: The True Story of the Pre-Trib Rapture (Plainsfield: Logos International, 1975). 21. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 64. 22. William Kephart, Extraordinary Groups (New York: St. Martin’s, 1976). 23. Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 36; Stephen J. Stein, “Signs of the Times: The Theological Foundations of Early Mormon Apocalyptic,” Sunstone 8 (January–April 1983): 60; Grant Underwood, “Seminal Versus Sesquicentennial Saints: A Look At Mormon Millennialism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14 (spring 1981): 39; and idem, “Millenarianism and the Early Mormon Mind,” Journal of Mormon History 9 (1982), 41–51. 24. For a good overview of the Millerites, see Eric Anderson, “The Millerite Use of Prophecy,” in The Disappointed, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 78–91. Of course, volume 4 of Froom’s massive work The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers is a more comprehensive treatment, albeit Adventist apologetic. 25. Doctrine and Covenants, sects. 27:6, 8; 33:18; 34:7, 12; 35:15, 27; 38:8; 39:24: 41:4; 86:10; 109:73. 26. Cited in Dan Vogel, Religious Seekers and the Advent of Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1988), p. 188. 27. Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1984), pp. 273–274. 28. Changes were made to the 1829 revelation in Smith’s Book of Commandments

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4:6, later published as Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 5:19. In the former, the apocalyptic warnings are addressed to “this generation”; this does not appear in the latter. 29. See Stephen C. LeSueur’s excellent The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987). 30. Joseph Smith Jr., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1964), 2:182. 31. Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 130:15. 32. Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6:254; see 5:336. Many first-generation Mormons believed that Jesus would appear no later than 1890 or 1891. See Oliver B. Huntington’s calculation for the end time in his journal (Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University), 2:129. 33. Klaus J. Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of the Fifty (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), passim. 34. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, p. 175. 35. Richard T. Hughes, “Two Restoration Traditions: Mormons and Churches of Christ in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Mormon History 19 (spring 1993): 50. 36. David Smith, “Millenarian Scholarship in America,” American Quarterly 17 (fall 1965): 542. 37. Timothy Smith, “The Book of Mormon in a Biblical Culture,” Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980): 17–18. 38. Keith E. Norman, “How Long O Lord? The Delay of the Parousia in Mormonism,” Sunstone 8 (January 1983): 59–65. Also see Louis G. Reinwand, “An Interpretative Study of Mormon Millennialism During the Nineteenth Century in Utah” (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1971). 39. Grant Underwood, “The Millenarian World of Mormonism” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 392–393. 40. Grant Underwood, “Early Mormon Perceptions of Contemporary America, 1830–1846,” Brigham Young University Studies 26 (summer 1986): 58. 41. Underwood, “The Millenarian World of Mormonism,” p. 125. 42. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 103–131. 43. Clyde R. Forsberg Jr., “In Search of the Historical Nephi: The Book of Mormon, ‘Evangelicalisms’ and Antebellum American Popular Culture, c. 1830” (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, 1994), pp. 309–353. 44. Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, pp. 127–138. 45. See Times and Seasons 3 (April 1842): 746. 46. Ethan Smith, A Key to the Figurative Language Found in the Sacred Scriptures (Exeter, N.H.: C. Norris, 1814). 47. J. Bicheno, The Signs of the Times (Albany, N.Y., 1795). 48. Arthur E. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (New York: University, 1970), 1:441–458.

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49. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871; reprint, Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1947), p. 321.

.    1. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 34. 2. Heber C. Kimball, “Spiritual Dissolution—Ignorance of the World,” Journal of Discourses 5 (September 1857): 275–276; Orson Pratt, “Discourse by Elder Orson Pratt,” Journal of Discourses 14 (March 1872): 343–356; Brigham Young, “Remarks by President Brigham Young,” Journal of Discourses 16 (May 1873): 71–77; Wilford Woodruff, “The Faculties Afforded by the Handcarts for the Gathering of Israel,” Journal of Discourses 4 (October 1856): 94–100; idem, “Discourse by Elder Wilford Woodruff,” Journal of Discourses 16 (October 1873): 263–272; and Erastus Snow, “Discourse of Elder Erastus Snow: Ancient Prophecy, Relating to the Time of the Restitution of All Things, to be Fulfilled,” Journal of Discourses 16 (September 1873): 200–208. 3. Joseph Smith Jr., The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1977), pp. 14–15; emphasis added. Smith’s futurist interpretation of Isaiah 11:11 recalls that in 2 Nephi 6:14; 25:11–19; 29:1–2; and Jacob 6:2. See also Doctrine and Covenants, sects. 35:25; 38:33; 45:17; 84:23–24,99–102; 101:12; 110; 113:8; 133; and Moses 7:60–69 in The Pearl of Great Price (addendum to Doctrine and Covenants). 4. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, pp. 84–85. 5. See Timothy Weber, In the Shadow of the Second Coming (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 177–203. 6. Herman A. Hoyt, “Dispensational Premillennialism,” in The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views, ed. Robert C. Clouse (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity, 1977), p. 72. 7. 3 Nephi 20:10, 12, 22; 21:14, 22–25; and Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 45:66. Note that a Jewish state is part and parcel of the millennial kingdom according to Joseph Fielding Smith: “Palestine is to be the gathering place of the tribe of Judah and ‘the children of Israel his companions,’ after their long dispersion as predicted by the prophets. America is the land of Zion. . . . In each land a holy city shall be built which shall be the capital from whence the law and word of the Lord shall go forth to all peoples” (Doctrines of Salvation [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1977], 3:67–68). 8. Orson Pratt, The New Jerusalem; or, The Fulfilment of Ancient Prophecy (Liverpool, 1849), p. 4. 9. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 566. 10. Stephen Epperson, Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), p. viii.

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11. Brigham Young, “Spiritual Gifts . . . ,” Journal of Discourses 2 (December 1854): 142–143. 12. Orson Pratt, “Discourse by Elder Orson Pratt,” Journal of Discourses 15 (September 1872): 190. 13. See Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 133; and Melodie Moench Charles, “Nineteenth-Century Mormons: The New Israel,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 12 (spring 1979): 42–54. 14. O. Michael Friedman, Origins of the British Israelites: The Lost Tribes (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993). 15. See John George and Laird Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe: Political Extremism in America (New York: Prometheus, 1992), pp. 368–370. 16. Epperson, Mormons and Jews, pp. 139–171. 17. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of A New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. x. 18. In this connection, see Jacob Neusner, First-Century Judaism in Crisis (New York: Ktav, 1982); and Jacob Neusner, William S. Green, and Ernest Frerichs, eds., Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

.       :  -  1. Mormons are not the only Americans to identify Cain as the father of the African race. See Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 242, 416; and Caroline L. Shanks, “The Biblical Anti-Slavery Argument of the Decade, 1830–1840,” Journal of Negro History 16 (April 1931): 132–157. 2. Klaus J. Hansen, “The Metamorphosis of the Kingdom of God,” in The New Mormon History, ed. D. Michael Quinn (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1992), pp. 221–246. 3. Newell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), p. 17. 4. Jessie L. Embry, Black Saints in a White Church: Contemporary African American Mormons (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1994), p. 74. 5. Stupidly, I once ridiculed a brother-in-law, who is a Métis Indian and convert to Mormonism, for insisting that he be called a Nephite since the Book of Mormon (in which he firmly believes) says the Nephites were exterminated. At the time, his point was lost on me. 6. Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 84. 7. D. Michael Quinn, ed. and trans., “The First Months of Mormonism: A Contemporary View by Rev. Diedrich Willer,” New York History 54 (July 1973): 317–332.

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8. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), p. 9. 9. Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 249–264. 10. Generally, biblical literalists have been among the greatest advocates of the Curse of Canaan myth and thus of slavery. See David E. Harrell Jr., Quest for a Christian America: The Disciples of Christ and American Society to 1866 (Nashville: Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 1966), p. 52; and Ralph L. Moellering, Christian Conscience and Negro Emancipation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965), p. 50. 11. Several scholars of Southern religious history emphasize the role Evangelicalism played in raising the consciousness of Africans and causing them to equate liberation with temporal as well as spiritual freedom. See Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Masonry, according to Steven Bullock, had the same effect. See his Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 137–162. 12. Latter Day Saints Messenger and Advocate, August 1835; Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 134:12. 13. Joseph Smith Jr., “Elder’s Journal,” entry for “Far West, Missouri, July 1838” (Special Collections, Brigham Young University), p. 42. 14. Joseph Smith Jr., “General Smith’s Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States” (Nauvoo, Ill.: John Taylor, 1844), p. 7. 15. See Richard D. Poll, “Joseph Smith and the Presidency, 1844,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (autumn 1968): 17–27. 16. Although the Kinderhook plates were a hoax, some Mormons still refuse to believe this. See William C. Wangeman, The Black Man: A Son of God (Bountiful, Utah: Horizon, 1979), p. 60. 17. Parley P. Pratt to John Van Cott, May 7, 1843, in Parley P. Pratt Papers, LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City. 18. See W. Cleon Skousen, The First 2000 Years (1953; reprint, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1971), p. 228. See also the Book of Abraham, in The Pearl of Great Price (addendum to Doctrine and Covenants), sect. 1:21–27; and Gen. 8:1, 9:30, 10:9–10, in Joseph Smith Jr., Inspired Version: The Holy Scriptures Containing the Old and New Testaments; An Inspired Revision of the Authorized Version (Independence, Mo.: Herald, 1944). 19. Skousen, The First 2000 Years, p. 119. 20. Sanford Porter, “Reminiscences, ca. 1872” (LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City), p. 173. 21. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 176. 22. The Mormon interest in cultivating the desert and remarkable advances in dryfarm irrigation techniques take on new meaning in light of this. It is little wonder that

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early Mormons sometimes preferred to work their fields rather than warm church pews, the evangelistic mission to the world a factor of how much sod they turned that day rather than how many sods they dragged to church. The idea that “building the kingdom” kept Mormonism from fashioning a theology does not seem to take into account the important ways in which agriculture is synonymous with theology in Mormonism, the land playing a vital role in the spread of the gospel to the inhabitants of the whole world in preparation for the second advent of Jesus Christ and the millennium. In this connection, see Hans A. Baer, Recreating Utopia in the Desert: A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mormonism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 143–147, 196–198. 23. Dan Vogel, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1986), pp. 75–77; B. H. Roberts, Studies of the Book of Mormon, ed. and intro. Truman G. Madsen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). See also Roberts, “Book of Mormon Difficulties” (presented to President Heber J. Grant and Counselors, the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, and the First Council of the Seventy, December 29, 1921, University of Utah Archives, Salt Lake City). 24. Roberts, Studies of the Book of Mormon, p. 192. 25. Vogel, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon, p. 5. 26. Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 1–12. 27. In this connection, see N. H. Parker, The Ten Tribes and All That (Toronto: Ryerson, 1938). 28. Preface to William Carpenter, The Israelites Found in the Anglo-Saxons . . . (London: George Kenning, 1874), p. i. 29. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 66. 30. Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 180. 31. See Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: The Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), p. 47; Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 45–65; and Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience, p. 181. 32. In this connection, see David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1982), pp. 127–157. 33. See Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 84–97. 34. Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, as Together Constituting One System of God (New York, 1863), p. 224. 35. Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 36–37. 36. Pearce, The Savages of America, p. 74.

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37. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 526. 38. B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 39–126. 39. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 127. 40. In this connection, see Hardy, Solemn Covenant, pp. 90–94, 112–113 nn. 60 and 61. 41. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience, p. 181. 42. Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Varieties of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, ed. Winthrop D. Jordan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 213–249. 43. Winthrop D. Jordan, introduction to ibid., pp. xlii–xliii. 44. See Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience, p. 182. 45. Scott H. Faulring, ed., An American Prophet’s Record: The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1989), p. 269. 46. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 297. 47. Pearce, The Savages of America, p. 74. 48. Bringhurst makes this very interesting connection in chapter 5 of his Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, pp. 84 ff. 49. Robert Marcum, Dominions of the Gadiantons (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1991); and Daniel C. Paterson, “The Gadianton Robbers as Guerrilla Warriors” (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1989). 50. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 424. 51. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, p. 529. See Robert I. Clegg, Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:175. 52. Lester E. Bush Jr., “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” in Neither White Nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church, ed. Lester E. Bush Jr. and Armand L. Mauss (Midvale, Utah: Signature, 1984), pp. 53–129. Stephen G. Taggart was the first to argue that Mormonism’s racial policies were not the fruit of revelation but Southern social and cultural biases which early Mormons adopted in order to allay fears that they were conspiring with natives and blacks to undermine the civil order of the state of Missouri. See Stephen G. Taggart, Mormonism’s Negro Policy: Social and Historical Origins (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1970). See also Lester E. Bush Jr., “A Commentary on Stephen G. Taggart’s Mormonism’s Negro Policy: Social and Historical Origins,” in Neither White Nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church, ed. Lester E. Bush Jr. and Armand L. Mauss (Midvale, Utah: Signature, 1984), pp. 31–52. Bush argues that Hansen’s arguments constitute a “more broadly stated Missouri thesis” (p. 201). 53. For a good discussion of Young’s theological rationale for censuring blacks, see Ronald K. Esplin, “Brigham Young and Priesthood Denial to the Blacks,” Brigham Young University Studies 19 (spring 1979): 394–402. Also see Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 210–222. Young

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believed that “blacks should not be treated as property but were destined to be servants and thus not equals or to hold civil or ecclesiastical office” (p. 240). 54. See Dean May, “A Demographic Portrait of the Mormons,” in The New Mormon History, ed. D. Michael Quinn (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1992), pp. 121–135; and Richard L. Jensen, “Mother Tongue: Use of Non-English Languages in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States, 1850–1983,” in New Views of Mormon History, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), pp. 273–303. 55. Gordon I. Irving, “The Law of Adoption: One Phase of the Development of the Mormon Concept of Salvation, 1830–1890,” Brigham Young University Studies 14 (spring 1974): 291–314. 56. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, p. xix. See also Newell G. Bringhurst, “A Servant of Servants . . . Cursed as Pertaining to the Priesthood: Mormon Attitudes toward Slavery and the Black Man, 1830–80” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1975). 57. Lester E. Bush, “Whence the Negro Doctrine,” in Neither White Nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church, ed. Lester E. Bush Jr. and Armand L. Mauss (Midvale, Utah: Signature, 1984), p. 208. 58. Esplin, “Brigham Young and Priesthood Denial to the Blacks,” p. 396. 59. Roger D. Launius, Invisible Saints: A History of Black Americans in the Reorganized Church (Independence, Mo.: Herald House, 1988), pp. 76–105. 60. Embry, Black Saints in a White Church, p. 39. 61. William E. Berrett, “The Church and the Negroid People,” supplement to John J. Stewart, Mormonism and the Negro (Orem, Utah: Community, Bookmark, 1960), p. 7. Also see John L. Lund, The Church and the Negro (n.p.: self-published, 1967), pp. 76–78. Lund argues that although Abel did work as a missionary, he was never ordained. The primary source for this is the entry for May 31, 1879, in the controversial L. John Nuttal Diary (typeset copy, Special Collections, Brigham Young University Library). Hansen points out that Abel’s patriarchal blessing does not contain an Israelite tribal designation (Mormonism and the American Experience, p. 240 n. 20). 62. Embry, Black Saints in a White Church, p. 39. 63. Mary Francis Sturlaugson, A Soul So Rebellious (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1981), pp. 62–64.

.     :    1. See John William Ward, “Jacksonian Democratic Thought: ‘A Natural Charter of Privilege,’ ” in The Development of an American Culture, ed. Stanley Coben and Lorman Ratner (Englewood Cliffs, 1970), pp. 44–63.

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2. See William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reforms: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 162–171. 3. Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (1957; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 187. Dan Vogel, on the other hand, contends that “Mormonism was more syncretic than synthetic, never fully reconciling contradictory tenets and opposing organizational structures, but rather allowing extremes to balance each other,” thus Smith departed “from other American models by combining elements of capitalism with common stock as well as his uneasy combination of theocracy and democracy (‘common consent’) in church government” (Religious Seekers and the Advent of Mormonism [Salt Lake City: Signature, 1988], pp. 216–217). 4. Leonard J. Arrington, The Great Basin Kingdom: Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), p. 35. 5. See Roger D. Launius and Linda Thatcher, eds., Differing Visions: Dissenters in Mormon History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 6. Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work: Book of Mormon, 1830 First Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1963), pp. 507, 514. 7. Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 124. Also see Vogel, Religious Seekers and the Advent of Mormonism, p. 174. 8. James M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), pp. 95–159. 9. Hans A. Baer, Recreating Utopia in the Desert: A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mormonism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 14. 10. D. Michael Quinn, “The Mormon Hierarchy, 1832–1932: The American Elite” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976), p. 155. 11. See John Heinerman and Anson Shupe, The Mormon Corporate Empire (Boston: Beacon, 1985). 12. Joseph Smith Jr., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1964), 1:146–147. 13. Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 38:22–27, 39. 14. Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox and Dean May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 34. 15. Quoted in Henry D. Moyle, “Some Practical Phases of Church Security,” Improvement Era 40 (June 1939): 354. 16. John R. Sillito and John S. McCormick, “Socialist Saints: Mormons and the Socialist Party in Utah, 1900–1920,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (spring 1985): 121–131. 17. J. Reuben Clark, Conference Report (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 1942), pp. 54–58.

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18. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, pp. 507, 514. 19. Albert G. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry (London: Griffin, 1873), p. 53. 20. Rob Morris, “A Practical Synopsis of Masonic Law and Usage, Alphabetically Arranged for General Use,” addendum to Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), p. 234. 21. Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor (1816), ed. Rob Morris (Cincinnati: John Sherer, 1860), p. 32. 22. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 185. 23. Doctrine and Covenants, sect. 75:29. 24. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p. xii. 25. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Morrow, 1999).

:  “  ”   1. James B. Allen, “Since 1950: Creators and Creations of Mormon History,” in New Views of Mormon History, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), p. 429. Also see Marvin S. Hill, “Survey: The Historiography of Mormonism,” Church History 28 (1959): 418–426; and Thomas G. Alexander, “The Place of Joseph Smith in the Development of American Religion: A Historiographical Inquiry,” Journal of Mormon History 5 (1978): 3–17. 2. Alexander Campbell, Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon; with an Examination of the Internal and External Evidences (Boston: Joshua V. Himes, 1832); E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed [sic] (Painesville: self-published, 1834); John C. Bennett, The History of the Saints (Boston: Leland and Whiting, 1842); Pomeroy Tucker, Origin, Rise, and Progress of Mormonism (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1867); Orasmus Turner, “Origin of the Mormon Imposture,” Littel’s Living Age 30 (July–September 1851): 429–431. 3. Parley P. Pratt, Mormonism Unveiled: Zion’s Watchman Unmasked, and Its Editors, Mr. L. R. Sunderland, Exposed (New York: Orson Pratt and Elijah Fordham, 1838); John Corill, Brief History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (St. Louis: self-published, 1839); David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, Mo.: selfpublished, 1887); Lucy Mack Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet and His Progenitors for Many Generations (1912; reprint, Independence, Mo.: Herald House, 1969). 4. Joseph Smith Jr., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1964). 5. Jules Remy and Julius Brenchley, A Journey to the Great Salt Lake, with a Sketch of the History, Religion, and Customs of the Mormons (London: W. Jeffs, 1861); I. Woodbridge

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Riley, The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith Jr. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902); Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen (Halle: Max Miemeyer, 1912); Bernard De Voto, “The Centennial of Mormonism: A Study in Utopia and Dictatorship,” in Forays and Rebuttals (Boston, 1936); Whitney Cross, The BurnedOver District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950); and Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (1957; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 6. Leonard J. Arrington, The Great Basin Kingdom: Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958); and Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950). See also Robert B. Flanders, “Some Reflections on the New Mormon History,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9 (spring 1974): 34–41; and Lawrence Foster, “New Perspectives on the Mormon Past,” Sunstone 7 (January–February 1982): 41–45. 7. For Brodie’s position, see Marvin S. Hill, “Secular or Sectarian History? A Critique of ‘No Man Knows My History,’ ” Church History 43 (March 1974): 78–96. 8. Klaus J. Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of the Fifty (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967). 9. Marvin S. Hill, “Quest for Refuge: An Hypothesis as to the Social Origins and Nature of the Mormon Political Kingdom,” Journal of Mormon History 2 (1975): 3–20. 10. Mario S. De Pillis, “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (spring 1966): 68–88; idem, “Mormonism and the American Way: A Response,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (summer 1966): 89–97; Jan Shipps, “The Prophet Puzzle: Suggestions Leading Toward a Mormon Comprehensive Interpretation of Joseph Smith,” Journal of Mormon History 1 (1974): 2–20; and Paul M. Edwards, “The Secular Smiths,” Journal of Mormon History 4 (1977): 3–17. 11. Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 12. R. Lawrence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Nathan O. Hatch, “In Pursuit of Religious Freedom: Church, State, and People in the New Republic,” in The American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1987), pp. 388–406; idem, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 68–81; idem, “The Democratization of Christianity and the Character of American Politics,” in Religion and American Politics, ed. Mark Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 92–120; Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61 (1980): 359–389; and Kenneth Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

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13. Hatch, “The Democratization of Christianity,” p. 97; also see pp. 99, 103. 14. Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, p. 36. 15. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty, pp. 46–47. 16. In this connection, see Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), pp. 95–124, in particular, the notion that the Civil War was a constitutional crisis, among other things. 17. Margaret Jacob, “Freemasonry, Women, and the Paradox of the Enlightenment,” in Women and the Enlightenment, ed. Margaret Hunt (Binghamton, N.Y.: Institute for Research in History and Haworth, 1984), pp. 69–91.

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index

Abbott, Scott, xvii, 69, 80, 81, 86 Abel, Elijah, 221 Abiff, Hiram: allusions to murder in Book of Nephi, 115; claimed by Masons to be Solomon’s architect, 2; murder by fellow masons, 59; represented by Abinadi, 124; resemblance to Nephi, 67 Abinadi, 94, 124, 125, 126 Abinadi Delivers His Message to Wicked King Noah, 138fig. Abish, 90, 95 Abolitionists, 205, 206 Abraham, Book of, 30, 204 Acacia tree, 71 Aventures de Télémaque, 81 African Americans: as Masons, 22; see also Cain/Canaan/Canaanites; Racism of Mormonism Africans and Native Americans; The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, 205 Age of Reason, 21 Akenson, Donald H., 82–83

Alexander, Thomas, 168 Alma, 94–95, 145, 156–57, 162–63, 233 Alma Baptizes in the Waters of Mormon, 92fig. American Indians: descent from Lost Tribes, 211; failure of Mormon mission to, 245; foster children in Mormon homes, 223; Masonic Improved Order of Red Men, 55; Mormonism’s Hebraic spin on origins of, 210; Mormonism’s plan for interracial polygamy, xix-xx, 217–18, 245; Mormon missionaries to marry, 217–18; see also Racism of Mormonism American Rite (Masonic), xxi, 7 Amlicites, 205 Ammon, 95, 122–26, 213 Anabaptists, 169 Ancient (Royal Arch) Masons. See Royal Arch (Ancient) Masonry Anderson, James, 81 Anderson, Lynn Matthews, 91 Andrus, Milo, 155 Anthon, Charles, 28

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Anthon transcript, 28, 29fig., 30 Antimasonic Party, 22 Antiquity of the Jews, 118 Anti-Semitism, 193, 195, 198, 200, 210 Apocalypse. See Eschatology, Second Coming, Apocalypse The Appearance of Jesus to the Nephites, 130fig. Apron of Master Mason, 114 Arianism, 161, 169, 175, 177 Ark and Dove honorary degree, 37 Arminianism, 139, 191 Arrington, Leonard J., 226, 230 “Assassins and Anseyreeh,” 74 Augsberg Confession, 160, 165 Augustine, 186 Ausfuhrung des Plans und Zweckes Jesu, 82 Bahrdt, Carl Friedreich, 82 Ballou, Hosea, 164 Baptism, 142–43, 145, 146–47, 149–51, 156, 165, 176 Barlow, Philip, 133–34 Barr, Oliver, 168 Barrett, Francis, 36 Barrett, Ivan J., 46 Bennett, John C., 239 Berkhofer, Robert F., 211 Berkin, Carol, xvi Bible: Book of Isaiah, 101; Book of Mormon recalling narrative of Moses and Aaron, 57; Book of Revelation, 195– 96; as inventive reworking of Hebraic legend, 82–83; millenarian predictions of, 185–86; in Mormonism, 133–34 Bilderback, James C., 44 Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet and His Progenitors for Many Generations, 68 Birth of a Nation, 215 Blacks. See African Americans; Racism of Mormonism

INDEX

Black Saints in a White Church, 221 Blindfold, 57–59 Bloch, Ruth, 188–89 Blood oaths. See Oaths/blood oaths Bloom, Harold, xvii, 171 Blue Lodge, 6 Boaz, 18, 19 Boggs, Lilburn W., 78 Book of Abraham, 30, 173, 179, 204 Book of Ether, 102–3, 105, 200 The Book of the Lodge, 122, 149, 171 Book of Mormon: alleged similarities to Spaulding’s Manuscript Found, 85–86; alleged translation or dictation, 27–28; Alma on death, salvation, heaven, and hell, 156–57; attacking religious elitism, 77–78; attacking secret societies/ combinations, 72, 75, 109; on baptism, 156, 165; biblical subtext of, 57, 101–2; Book of Ether, 102–3, 105, 200; Book of Helaman, 127; Book of Alma, 127; common theological ground for male and female, 151; on companionship of Holy Ghost, 149; continuing criticism of, 26; critique of apostate Masonry, 218; on death, salvation, heaven, and hell, 154, 155–56, 157–59, 165–66; endorsing Finneyite model of spiritual new birth, 146; on faith, repentance, and baptism, 145; as feminist statement, 91; Gadiantons/Gadianton Robbers, 73, 74, 77, 220; horrors depicted in, 212; inclusive tendencies and adoptive agenda, 94; Jaredites, 76, 103, 105, 108–9, 206; lauding virtues of the mischievous, hidden, and mysterious, 80; Lehi’s vision, blessing, and admonishments, 67–69, 72–73; length, 120; as literary means of disentanglement from female moral dominance, 87–88; Masonic agenda of, xxi, 50, 113; Masonic baptisms, 149–50; as Masonic

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fiction and locus of male worship and rite of passage, 80, 82, 86–87; Masonic interpretation of “new birth,” 148–49; as Masonic monitor, 22; mistaken antiMasonic interpretation, 43–44; Nephites as protagonists, 74; origin, circulation, and sales of, 25; outdoor setting for, 71–72; paucity of female role models in, 89–91; plan for racial equality, 216; references to hellfire and unprofitable servants, 72; relegated to back shelf, 133–34, 135; reverence for Virgin Mary, 71; on salvation of heathens, 165–66; as summary of major current issues, 26; Swedenborgian influence, 158–59, 162–66; taking issue with smear tactics, 75–76; women in, 79, 88, 90–91; Young contravening adoptive spirit of, 223; see also First Vision; Mormonism; Mosiah, Book of; Nephi, books of; Revelations to Smith; Smith, Joseph Jr.; 3 Nephi, Book of Book of Mormon, illustrations from: Abinadi Delivers His Message to Wicked King Noah, 138fig.; Alma Baptizes in the Waters of Mormon, 92fig.; The Appearance of Jesus to the Nephites, 130fig.; Brother of Jared in the presence of the Deity, 107fig.; Captain Moroni Raises the Title of Liberty, 100fig.; facsimile of characters, 29fig.; Helaman Leads an Army of 2,000 Ammonite Youths, 184fig.; Joseph Smith Receives the Plates, 24fig.; Lehi Discovers the Liahona, 120fig.; Young Nephi Subdues His Rebellious Brothers, 110fig.; see also Mormonism, illustrations related to Book of Moses, 175, 176–77 Book of Revelation, 195–96 Brazen Serpent, Knight of the, 176 Brenchley, Julius, 239

Brethren (or Dunkers), 145–46 Brigham City Cooperative, 230 Bringhurst, Newell G., 204, 221 British Israelites, 193, 195, 199, 200, 210 Brodie, Fawn M.: arguing for antiMasonic interpretation of Mormonism, 43–44; assessment of Smith’s writing skills, 25; on Gadiantons/Gadianton Robbers, 73, 77; on origin of name “Mormon,” xv; pro-American interpretation of Mormonism, 239–40 Brooke, John L., xvii, 11–12, 45, 115, 158, 180, 240 Brother Joseph Brant, The Mohawk Chief, 222fig. Brother of Jared in the presence of the Deity, 107fig. Brothers, Richard, 210 Brother William McKinley, Knight Templar and Twice President of the United States, 241fig. Brown, Benjamin, 155 Browning, James Allen, 155 Bruce, Eli, 21 Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons, 230 Bullock, Steven C., xvii, 8, 11, 75, 92, 235 Bush, Lester E., 221 Bushman, Richard L., 135, 240 Bushnell, Horace, 211 Cain/Canaan/Canaanites: African American men as offspring of, 222–23; apostate priesthood, 109, 206, 219, 220, 222–23; Book of Mormon on reclamation of native peoples, 217–18; confusion with Tubal-Cain, 73; curse of dark skin, 206, 215; Masons and Ham, 74; see also Racism of Mormonism Cain’s wife, 206–7 Calvinism, 72, 139, 141, 146, 147, 163–65 Camorah, 220

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Campbell, Alexander, 142–43, 239 “Camps,” 16–17, 47 Cane/rod/wand/pedum, 46–47, 48fig., 69, 70 Captain Kidd, 85 Captain Moroni Raises the Title of Liberty, 100fig. Carnes, Mark C.: on Adam’s fall and redemption, 148; on discovery of long lost book of the Law, 64; on fraternal initiation, xvii, 80, 86–87, 88; on Improved Order of Red Men, 55; on role of Bible in Masonry, 102 Carpenter, William, 210 Cassara, Ernest, 147 “Chamber of Reflection” scenario, 53fig., 61 Chambers, Samuel, 221 Channing, William Ellery, 75, 140 The Character, Claims, and Practical Workings of Freemasonry, 50 Charles, Melodie Moench, 89–91, 169 Chase, Durfee, 52 Chastanier, Benedict, 159 Cherny, Robert, xvi Christian (Chivalric) degrees, 6, 128, 129, 130 Christian Identity Movement, 210 The Christian System, 142, 143 Church Security Plan or Welfare System, 230–31 City of God, 83–84 Clark, J. Reuben Jr., 231 Clawson, Mary Ann, xvii Clegg, Robert I.: on forest-like outdoor setting of Forest Masonry, 71–72; on lighting in Masonic lodges, 108; on Name of God, 36; on symbolism of tent, 113–14 Clinton, De Witt, xvi, 16–17, 243 Color/race. See Cain/Canaan/ Canaanites; Lamanites, curse and

INDEX

redemption of; Racism of Mormonism Communism and communitarianism, 226, 227, 231, 241 Compass, 119–20 Congregationalists, 16 Constitutions of the Free Masons’, 81 Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism, xvii Conversion. See First Vision (Smith’s conversion dream and its Masonic overtones) Corrill, John, 226–27, 239 Cowdery, Oliver, 30 Craft Masonry, 6, 7 Cross, Whitney R., 239 Cult of domesticity, 92–93 Cutler, Alpheus, 227 Dalcho, Frederick, 14 Daraul, Akron, 107 Darby, John Nelson, 194, 198 Darius, 117–18 Death, salvation, heaven, and hell: Alma on, 156–57, 162–63; Augsberg Confession on, 160, 165; Masonic concepts of, 154; Mormon concepts of, 154, 155–56, 157–59; Protestant concepts of, 155, 160–61, 164–65; Universalist concepts of, 159, 161–62; Westminster Confession of Faith on, 141, 160–61 De Benneville, George, 147 Defoe, Daniel, 84 Degrees: American Rite, 7; Chivalric, 6, 128; Christian, 128; honorary Ark and Dove, 37; Knights of Malta, 131–33; original three, 6; Ramsay’s new Royal Arch system, 6; of Scottish Rite, 6, 14–15; Seventeenth, 176; Twentyeighth, 178; Twenty-fifth, 176; TwentySixth (Trinitarian), 176 De Molai, Jacques, 124–25

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DePillis, Mario S., 240 De Principiis, 159 Devil, the (Satan/Lucifer), 172, 175, 182 De Voto, Bernard, 239 Dispensationalism, 190, 192, 194, 195, 198 Doctrine and Covenants, 173 Dove Medallion, 49fig. Dumenil, Lynn, xvii Dunkers (Brethren), 145–46 Dwight, Timothy, 139–40 Dyslexia of Smith, 27–30, 32 Eastern Star, Order of, 96, 244 Ecclesiastical History, 83–84 Economic practices and theory in Mormonism: as antithesis of communism, 231; as attempt to balance needs of individual and community, 226; Brigham City Cooperative, 230; Church Security Plan or Welfare System, 230–31; communal holding of goods, 228; consumers’ cooperative system, 230; defense of communitarianism, Jacksonian theory, 227; eradication of poverty, 228–29; eschewing conspicuous consumption, 232; fraternalism versus “Sociocracy,” 225, 226; as Jacksonian self-reliance, determination, and hard work, 225, 232; Law of Consecration and Stewardship, 228, 229, 230; Law of Tithing, 230; of Masonic rather than Marxist derivation, 234; Mormons first, excepting African Americans, 237; mutual Christian aid and care for needy, 228; as neither communistic nor theocratic, 226; poverty as unavoidable but curable, 234 Edwards, Jonathan, 174 Edwards, Paul, 240 Egyptian Rite, 128

Elwood, Douglas, 174 Embry, Jessie, 204, 221, 223 Endowment, 220, 244, 245 England, Eugene, 170 Enoch, 50, 62, 65fig., 208–9 Enochian alphabet, 37, 38fig., 40 Enos, 219 Entered Apprentice, 66–67 Epperson, Stephen, 169, 199 Equality (in Masonry), 53 Eschatology, Second Coming, Apocalypse: Augustine on, 186; conflict between pre- and postmillennialism, 186–89; early adjustment of predictions, 185–86; Jesus calling for, 185; Protestant, 187–88; see also Millennialism, pre- and postEsplin, Ronald K., 221 An Essay on the Causes of the Varieties of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, 217 Ether, Book of, 102–3, 105, 200 Evangelicalism: attacking Masonic charitable relief, 235; backing Victorian family arrangement and role models, 91, 92–93; baptism and, 146, 147; as early feminism, xvii; influencing Masonic ritual, 16–17; locating Mormonism on lunatic fringe of Protestantism, 134; Morgan affair aiding, 52–53, 55; Mormonism’s prejudice against, xx, 154, 155; not free from economic racial bias, 237; opposing religious/biblical fiction, 84–85; opposition to Masonry, 8; opposition to secret societies, xv; as Smith target for militant propagandizing, 75–76; as Trinitarians versus Universalists, 168; triumph of, following Civil War, xvi, xx; see also Protestantism Excitement, 75

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Faber, G. S., 109 Faith, 142, 143, 145 Faludi, Susan, 237 Fama Fraternitatus, 81 Fels, Tony, 8 Feminism: and Evangelicalism, xvii; Mormon, 91, 172, 173 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La, 81 Fessler, Ignatius Aurelius, 81, 84 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 81, 84 Fiction in Mormonism and Masonry, 80–82 Fictions of Freemasonry, 80 Fielding, Joseph, 194 Finney, Charles Grandison, 50–51, 72, 142, 143–44 First Vision (Smith’s conversion dream and its Masonic overtones): apology for adolescent peccadilloes, 61; darkness and blindfold, 57–59; early visions recurring annually, 62–63; James 1:5 and enquiry of Lord, 60–61; Moroni’s nocturnal appearances, 61–62, 63, 64; Smith’s initial inability to feel, 142; sun, moon, and stars, 59; targeting rancor of antiMasonry, 75; as testimony of Royal Arch Mason, 50; unearthing of golden plates, 65–66; virtues of concord, 61; withdrawal to bedroom as “Chamber of Reflection” scenario, 53fig., 61 Florine of Burgundy, Templar Knight and Faithful Companion of Sweno the Dane, 87fig. Forbes, Jack D., 205 Forest Masonry, 71–72 Foster, Lawrence, 240 Fox, Feramorz, Y., 230 Franklin, Benjamin, 11, 12fig., 13 Fraternal supper, 176 The Freemason, 210

INDEX

The Freemason Examin’d, 116 Freemasons. See Masonry/Freemasonry The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Freemasonry, xx-xxi, 19 Futurists, 190, 194 Gadiantons/Gadianton Robbers, 73, 74, 77, 220 Gazelam, 50 Gender issues. See Women Gentiles, 197, 198 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods, 228 Gibalim, 50 Gnosticism, 171, 172, 176, 187–88 God, concept of: in orthodox Christianity, 176; in Scottish Rite, 176 God, Mormon concept of: Christian Neoplatonism, 174, 180; consistent with patriarchical notions, 173; development from modalistic unity to hierarchy of gods, 170; divine love versus evil and suffering, 175–76; evolution of, 168–69; Father of God, 181; as first and earliest Christianity, 172; humans capable of resembling Diety, 180; as intellectual quagmire, 170; message to women in, 179; as Mother, 172–73; Mother in heaven, 182; nature of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 178–79; by Origen, 174; as outside pale of orthodox Judaism and Christianity, 171; polytheism and pluralism, 173–74, 177–78; as preexistent Christ, 171; as Sabellian Monophysite/Unitarian interpretation, 169, 170, 177; separating Mormons and mainline Christians, 168; as similar to and apology for Christian Masonry, 171–72, 176–77, 178, 179, 180, 181–82 Goethe, 86

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Golden plates: discovery from “brown seer stone,” 52; as possible Masonic mnemonic device, 32; providing “proof” of assertions, 3, 28; as Smith family parchment (as Masonic tracing board), 37; Smith’s claims of miraculous translation, 26; unearthing of, 65–66 Goodman, Paul, xvii, 93, 168 Goodwin, S. H., 44 Goose and Gridiron Tavern, 9fig. Gormy, James, xvi Gould, Robert Freke, 53 Grant, Heber J., 230–31 Great Basin Kingdom, 226 The Great Eclipse and Terrible War About to be Made in His Name, 125fig. Greek in Smith family parchment (as Masonic tracing board), 34–36 Griffith, D. W., 215 Groesbeck, C. Jess, 68 Hale, Sarah J., 93 Hale, Van, 173 Hall, Prince, 21–22 Hansen, Klaus J., 193, 216–17, 227, 240, 243, 244 Hardy, B. Carmon, 214, 240, 243 Harris, Martin, 28 Hatch, Nathan O., 240 Heaven and hell. See Death, salvation, heaven, and hell Heavenly flesh theory, 169 Hebrew in Smith family parchment (as Masonic tracing board), 34–36 Helam, 145 Helaman Leads an Army of 2,000 Ammonite Youths, 184fig. Hexham, Irving, 169 Hill, Marvin S., 240 Historicism, 190 The History of the Church, 239



Hodge, Charles, 165, 188 Hogan, Mervin B., 44–45 Holy Ghost, 149 Homer, Michael, xvii Hopkins, Hiram, 19, 21 Howe, Eber D., 44, 239 Hoyt, Herman A., 198 Hughes, Richard T., 193 Hullinger, Robert, 128 Hundred Years, 44 Hutchinson, William, 14 Hyde, Orson, 201, 209 Illustrations of Freemasonry, 18–19 Improved Order of Red Men, 55 Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon, 209 Indians. See American Indians Ingraham, Joseph Holt, 84 Inspired Version; The Holy Scriptures Containing the Old and New Testaments..., 177, 207–9 Iron rod, 69, 70 Iroquois: The League of the Iroquios, xix-xx; Order of the Iroquois, 55 Irving, Edward and Irvingites, 190, 194, 195 Isabel, 90 Israelites, British, 193, 195, 199, 200, 210 Jachin, 18, 19 Jacob, 232–33 James, Jane Manning, 221 Jared, Brother of, 103, 107fig., 169 Jared, Daughter of, 90, 109 Jaredites, 76, 103, 105, 108–9, 206 Jefferds, Oren, 155 Jefferson, Thomas, 9, 11 Jerusalem, 118, 123, 132 Jerusalem Lodge, London, 18 Jesus: Appearance of Jesus to the Nephites, 130fig.; as best of Masonic sons, 172; biblical account, 128; calling for

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kingdom of God, 185; Masonic account, 3; Masonic belief in marriage of, 214; Mormon account, 80, 101, 127; as person/spirit of the Father, 171, 179; Phy on recreated, 85; Schweitzer on, 83; see also Eschatology, Second Coming, Apocalypse Jewel of an Ark Mariner, 104fig. Jewish Gnosticism, 171, 172 Jewish studies, 210 Jews: anti-Semitism, 193, 195; British Israelite belief in failure to live up to covenant, 193; conversion hoped for at Second Coming, 188; Knights Templar attitude toward, 195; Masonic attitude toward, 16 Jews, Mormon attitude toward: as Christian anti-Semitism, 198; concern with Holy Land rather than covenant people, 200–201; having Masonic or British Israelite slant, 193, 195, 199, 200, 210; House of Judah versus House of Israel, 200; as neo-Hebraic countermovement in opposition to Primitive Christianity, 202; resistance to proselytize among, 209; return of Israel to Palestine, Zion in America, 197, 199; Smith on, 197–98; Young on, 199–200 Jonas, Abraham, 46 Jordan, Winthrop D., 217 Joseph Smith Receives the Plates, 24fig. Josephus, 117, 118 Journey of the Freemason in the World, 70fig., 70–71 Judaism, 210 A Key to the Figurative Language Found in the Sacred Scriptures, 195 Kimball, Heber C., 44 Kimball, Spencer W., 203–4, 223 King Benjamin, 158, 234 King Follet Discourse, 173, 179–80, 181

INDEX

Kirkland, Boyd, 178 Knight of the Brazen Serpent, 176 Knight of the East and West, 176 Knight of the Sun, 178 Knights of Malta, 131–33 Knights Templar, Masonic: alleged journey to America, 3; belief in marriage of Jesus, 214; as brainchild of Ramsay, 6; De Molai, Jacques, 124–25; “Exhortation” as pattern for Jesus’ ministry, 132; Grand Encampment, 16–17; as inspiration for Book of Mormon, xxii; jealousy of Scottish Rite, 7; in New York, 17; original purpose, 113–14; origins, 13; raising and lifting up in initiation ritual, 131; role of decapitation, 115–16; The Sign in Heaven of the Knights Templar, 129fig.; symbols on Smith family parchment (as Masonic tracing board), 36; system of Egyptian characters used by, 107 Laban, 114, 115 Labor Is Worship, 236fig. Lamanites, curse and redemption of: as “colored,” 205; end of, 223–24; environmentalism (monogenesis), 208, 209, 211; hatred of Nephi/Nephites, 67, 115, 127; horrors depicted in, 212; Lehi’s counsel to, 72; lifting of color curse in offspring, 216; as male depravity, 219; metamorphosis from black to white, 219; as mission of Kimball, 204; by Nephi, 205; objections to identification as, 204; praised for endogamous monogamy, 214–15; quest for brass plates, 114; racial reclamation through miscegenation, 217; rape of daughters of, 212–13; Samuel as convert of Christianity, 219; Smith on, 207–9; see also Racism of Mormonism

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Latter-day Saints and LDS Church: origin of name, 47; versus Reorganized Latter Day Saints (RLDS), xiv; wealth and size, 228 Law of Consecration and Stewardship, 228, 229, 230 Law of Tithing, 230 LDS Doctrine and Covenants 93, 177, 180 Leavitt, Sarah Sturdevant, 154–55 Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 141, 142 Lectures on Faith, 173, 178–79 Lectures on Systematic Theology, 143 Lee, George P., 204 Lee, William, 84 Lehi, 94, 113–14 Lehi Discovers the Liahona, 120fig. Lemuel, 67, 72, 114, 115 A Lexicon of Freemasonry, 234 Liahona, 119–20 Limhi, 122, 123, 213 Lipson, Dorothy Ann, xvii, 8, 16, 93 Lost book of the Law, 64–65, 111, 113, 120 Lost Tribes, 200, 210, 211 Love, Christopher, 189–90 Lucifer, 172, 175, 182 Lyon, Edgar T., 168 McCormick, John S., 231 McGavin, E. Cecil, 44, 77 Mackey, Albert G., 45–46, 58, 74, 105, 106, 108, 130, 234 McKinley, William, 241fig. McLellin, William E., 134 McLoughlin, William C., 141 McMurrin, Sterling B., 167 Magic, Smith family practice of, 46 The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer..., 36 Making America, xvi Male embrace, 59 Manuscript Found, 85 Marriage in Temple, 203–4, 220, 221; see also Polygamy Mary (mother of Jesus), 71, 172

Masonic Model of the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem, 201fig. Masonry Dissected, 20 Masonry/Freemasonry: alleged origins and paucity of documentary evidence, 2–3; apocalyptic, 195; apron of Master Mason, 114; as blend of history and fiction, 80–82; British Israelites, 193, 195, 199, 200, 210; claims of foundation in Judaism/Israelitism, 210; concept of God, 171; concepts of death, salvation, heaven, and hell, 154; conversions to Mormonism in early years, 44; corrections and departures from King James Version of Bible, 102; defense of, by Thomas Paine, 21; early American interest in, xvi-xvii, 7; economic role of brotherly love, benevolence, and charity, 234–35; Egyptian Rite, 128; elitism and ostentation, 8, 11; exclusion of women, 92; Forest Masonry, 71; growth of, 1–2; involvement in antebellum politics, 243; as male bonding, boys’ night out, 7; Masonic Alphabet, 39fig.; novelists, 86; oldest lodge on record, 6; opposing Evangelicalism, xvi, xviii; orthodox, as Jewish faith, 128; as political liability, xvi; Red Cross Degree, 117; similarity of God concept to that of Mormonism, 171–72, 176–77, 178, 179, 180, 181– 82; stone worship/symbolism, 108, 114; Tower of Babel, 105; traditions of oral transmission of secret knowledge, 31, 40; use of device similar to Urim and Thummin, 32–33; women and separate-sphere doctrine, 93; see also Morgan, Captain William, and Morgan affair; Royal Arch (Ancient) Masonry; Scottish Rite Masonry/Freemasonry, illustrations related to: Ancient Lodge of Free-

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masonry, 54fig.; Anti-Anti-Masonic Polemic, 76fig.; Brother Benjamin Franklin, 12fig.; Brother George Washington, 10fig.; Brother Joseph Brant, The Mohawk Chief, 222fig.; Brother Thomas Smith Webb, 20fig.; Brother William McKinley, Knight Templar and Twice President of the United States, 241fig.; certificates of degrees, 4–5fig.; divining rod or pedum, 48fig.; English Templar Deacon Robert Crucifix, 49fig.; Florine of Burgundy, Templar Knight and Faithful Companion of Sweno the Dane, 87fig.; Goose and Gridiron Tavern, 9fig.; The Great Eclipse and Terrible War About to be Made in His Name, 125fig.; Jewel of an Ark Mariner, 104fig.; Journey of the Freemason in the World, 70fig.; Labor is Worship, 236fig.; Masonic Model of the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem, 201fig.; Masonic Penalties on Candidates, 77fig.; Moses, 106fig.; The Raising of a Master Mason, 58fig.; The Religions of the World, 60; Rose-Croix Apron with Password “pax Vobis” in Code, 41fig.; The Royal Arch Quest for the Golden Plates of Enoch, 65fig.; The Sign in Heaven of the Knights Templar, 129fig.; Sword of the Tiler, 116fig.; The Trials of Life, 69fig., 69 May, Dean, 230 Methodists, 16 Meyer, Eduard, 239 The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, 193 Millennialism, pre- and post-: Albert Schweitzer on, 187; as “already” versus “not yet,” 186–87; American post-Revolutionary politicization, 189; definitions, 192; forcing choice, 187;

INDEX

merging of Republican, anti-Federalist, and premillennialist ideas, 189–90; Mormon position on, 191–95; orthodox Christian position on, 192; overlap in America, 188–89; radical premillennialists, 187; resurgent pessimism, 190; see also Eschatology, Second Coming, Apocalypse Miller, Christopher, xvi Miller, William, 190–91 Mitchell, John, 14 Moderns, 6, 14 “Money diggers,” 46, 51 Monitor, The (The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Freemasonry), xx-xxi, 19 Monogenesis, 208, 210 Monophysites, 169 Moore, R. Laurence, 240 Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 35 Morgan, Captain William, and Morgan affair: Abinadi martydom as commentary on, 126; alleged origin of name “Mormonism,” xv; as ammunition for anti-Masonic Evangelicalism, 52–53; blow to respectability of Masonry, 1–2, 45; as blow to Smith’s hopes, 32, 45; description of incident, 17–21; ruining chance of Masonic Republic, xx; Smith’s jab at Masons, 207 Morgan, Jedidiah, 53 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 53 Mormon Doctrine of Diety, 168 Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, 57, 134 Mormonism: as accommodating and appealing to women, xvii-xix, 93–94; accused of un-American activities, 239; anti-Evangelical prejudice, 154, 155; apocalyptic lineage, 196; as bastion of exclusivity, 135; Bible in, 133–34; Christianity and, xiv, 133, 134; as

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Index

communitarian, 227, 241; contesting Evangelicalism, xx; cricitism of “apostate priesthood order,” 109, 110; as defense and reworking of Masonry, xx-xxii, 45, 133, 242–43; demographic of followers, 26; denied religious status by Congress, 244; early Protestant sensibility, 134; as European Masonry, 244–46; failure of mission to reconstitute, 245; female and male influences, xiv; as fraternity, xvii; as heterodox compared to mainstream America, 239; Jesus in, 80, 101, 127, 128, 130fig., 171, 175; missionary success in Great Britain, 244; ordination of males only, 151; outnumbered by latter-day Lamanite Evangelicals, 246; position on millennialism, 191–95; postmodernist repatriation, 240; Protestantization of, 133; quest for empire, 243; religious pluralism, 240–41; resembling Universalism, 157; schism in Latter-day Saints versus Reorganized Latter Day Saints (RLDS), xiv; submitting to Evangelical, Unionist social vision, 244; see also Book of Mormon; Economic practices and theory in Mormonism; God, Mormon concept of; Racism of Mormonism Mormonism and Freemasonry: The Illinois Episode, 45 Mormonism and Masonry, 77 Mormonism, illustrations related to: Dove Medallion, 49fig.; Early Mormon Broadside, 38fig.; Enochian alphabet, 38fig.; “Holiness to the Lord” Smith Family Artifact, 32, 33fig., 34; Joseph Smith Jr.’s cane, 47, 48fig.; LieutenantGeneral Joseph Smith Jr., Mormon Knight, Nauvoo Temple, 242fig.; Mark Hoffman Forgery of Anthon Transcript, 29fig.; Sample of Smith’s



Handwriting, 31fig.; see also Book of Mormon, illustrations from Mormon Neo-Othodoxy: A Crisis Theology, 168 Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel, 199 Moroni, 61–62, 63, 64, 100fig., 146 Morris, Rob, 19, 73, 234 Moses: Book of, 175, 176–77; in Exodus, 105; in Masonry, 106fig. Mosiah, Book of, 122–26, 213 Mother as Mormon God concept, 172–73 The Mythology of the Secret Societies, xvii Native Americans. See American Indians Nature and the Supernatural, As Together Constituting One System of God, 211 Nauvoo, Illinois, xv, 240 Nead, Peter, 146 Neoplatonism, 174, 176, 177, 180 Nephesch, 114 Nephi, books of: biblical subtext from Isaiah, 101; Campbellite notions of fall, original sin, etc., 144–46; curse on Lamanites, 205; decapitation of Laban, removal of plates/Torah, 115–17, 118– 19; economic condition, 227, 231–34; extrapolations unique to Webb, 118– 19; on God’s covenant with Israel, 197; hidden Templar agenda, 113; horrors depicted in, 212; inclusion of Masonic emblems, 66–67, 71; Jacob on righteous acquisitiveness, 232–33; Lehi, genealogy, Torah, and brass plates, 114; male lust blamed for downfall of Nephites, 214; paralleling Royal Arch quest for long lost book of the Law, 113, 120; paralleling story of Knights of Red Cross, 117; as protagonists in Book of Mormon, 74; on punishment of Jews, 198; on sleep as ignorance, 158; symbology of sword, Tiler, and compass/

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liahona, 119–20; Tree of Life, 163; Young Nephi Subdues His Rebellious Brothers, 110fig. Nephites, 74, 127 New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 158 The New Jerusalem; or, the Fulfilment of Ancient Prophecy, 199 New Jerusalem, 132, 200, 201 Noah, 74, 103, 105, 106–8, 122, 212, 213 Norman, Keith E., 193 Novels, religious, 84–85 Oaths/blood oaths, xviii, 96, 117, 244, 246 Observations on Free Masonry, 92 O’Dea, Thomas, 239 Oliver, George, 13, 40, 109, 122, 149, 171 Omer, 109 Opperman, Heinrich, 44 Order of Eastern Star, 96, 244 Origen, 159–60, 174 Original sin, 143, 148 The Origin of Pagan Idolatry, 109 Ostler, Blake T., 101, 178, 179–80 O’Sullivan, John L., 225 Paine, Thomas, 21 Palestine, return of Israel to, 197 Parchment of Smith family, 32–36 Parker, N. H., 210 Parousia, 159–60, 185 Paul, Robert, 173 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 211 Pearson, Carol Lynn, 91 Pedum/cane/rod/wand, 46–47, 48fig., 69, 70 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 84, 186–87 Phelps, W. W., 43, 44 Philip IV of France, 124, 126 Phy, Allene Stuart, 85 Pike, Albert, 35, 95, 176, 178, 195–96 Plotinus, 174 Poewe, Karla, 169

INDEX

Pollock, Gordon D., 134 Polygamy: end of practice promised, 244; excluding African American women, 222; hierarchy of wives, 224; interracial concubinage for racial harmony, xixxx, 213–14, 216, 217–18; Lamanites praised for endogamous monogamy, 214–15; as social means to fraternal end, 243 Polygenesis, 217 Polytheism and pluralism, 173–74, 177–78 Porter, Sanford, 206–7 Postmillennialism. See Millennialism, preand postPost, Stephen, 168 Practical Synopsis of Masonic Law and Usage, 95 Pratt, Orson, 135, 177–78, 199, 200 Pratt, Parley P., 206, 239 Premillennialism. See Millennialism, preand postPrichard, Samuel, 20–21 Priesthood Meeting, 151 Priesthood, Mormon, 203, 220, 223 Priest, Josiah, 211 Prince Hall Masonry, 21–22 The Prince of the House of David, 85 Protestantism: concepts of death, salvation, heaven, and hell, 155, 160–61, 164–65; on Second Coming, 188; support of Masonry, 15; in upheaval and transformation, 139; see also Evangelicalism Quest of the Historical Jesus, 83 Quinn, D. Michael, 46, 47, 228 Racism of Mormonism: African American men as cursed offspring of Cain and apostate priesthood, 222–23; African American men confined to own species, females to marry whites,

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218; American Indian foster children in Mormon homes, 223; American Indians as Caucasians with “bear grease and war paint,” 217; American Indians as noble and subhuman, 211–12; ban on Temple marriage for African Americans, 203–4, 220, 221; environmentalism (monogenesis), 208, 209, 211; interracial polygamy, mixed marriage, xix, xxii, 213–14; involving African Americans and Indians, 204; Mormonism’s plan for interracial polygamy with women of color, xixxx, 217–18, 245; polygenesis, 217; refusal of priesthood to African American men, 203, 220, 223; reversal in principle, 203–4; Smith’s ordination of African American men, 221; theory of climatic causes of races/colors, 217; see also Cain/Canaan/Canaanites; Lamanites, curse and redemption of Ramsay, Andrew Michael, 6, 81, 110–11 Red Cross Degree, 117 Relief Society, 151 Remy, Jules, 239 Reorganized Latter Day Saints (RLDS) versus Latter-day Saints, xiv Repentance, 143 The Restoration of All Things, 162 Revelation, Book of, 195–96 Revelation in Mormonism, 170 Revelations to Smith: Book of Abraham, 30, 173, 179, 204; Book of Moses, 175, 176–77; Doctrine and Covenants, 173; King Follet Discourse, 173, 179–80, 181; LDS Doctrine and Covenants 93, 177, 180; Lectures on Faith, 173, 178–79; see also Book of Mormon; First Vision Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and American Culture, xvii Reynolds, David, 84 Richardson, Samuel, 85

Rigdon, Sidney, 145, 198, 221 Riley, I. Woodbridge, 239 Roberts, B. H., 168, 209 Roberts, J. M., xvii Robinson Crusoe, 84 Robinson, Joseph Lee, 177 Rod/wand/cane/pedum, 46–47, 48fig., 69, 70 Rose-Croix Apron with Password “pax Vobis” in Code, 37, 41fig. Rosicrucians, 128 Royal Arch (Ancient) Masonry: books of Nephi paralleling quest for long lost book of the Law, 64–65, 111, 113, 120; born of schism, 12; color preferences, 7; end of rivalry with Moderns, 14; garb of Knights Templar, Masonic, 62; growth and popularity, 13; “Holiness to the Lord” as motto, 34; as inspiration for Book of Mormon, xxii; journey to Jerusalem, 123; on original sin, 148; origins of appellation, 6; role of decapitation, 115–16; trial of life, 69; vision of Enoch, 62; see also Lamanites, curse and redemption of; Masonry/Freemasonry The Royal Arch Companion, 118 Sabellianism, 169, 170, 177 Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, 204 Salvation. See Death, salvation, heaven, and hell Samson and Delilah, 109 Samuel the Lamanite, 109 Sandeen, Ernest, 194 Sargant, Thomas, 118, 123 Sariah, wife of Lehi, 90 Satan (the devil/Lucifer), 172, 175, 182 Schweitzer, Albert, 83, 187 Scottish Rite: arrival in America, 14; attraction to Book of Revelation, 195–96; concept of God in, 176, 180;

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continental Masonry gravitating to, xvii; degrees in, 6, 14–15; divine love versus evil and suffering, 175–76; doctrine of the Trinity, 177; Jesus as mediator, 175–76; Journey of the Freemason in the World, 70fig., 70–71; Knight of the Brazen Serpent, 176; Knight of the East and West, 176; as Royal Arch Masons, 128; suggesting Trinitarianism, 181; symbols on Smith family parchment (as Masonic tracing board), 36; Word or Logos, 35; see also Masonry/Freemasonry Seantum, 220 Second Coming. See Eschatology, Second Coming, Apocalypse Second Great Awakening, xvi, xvii, 21, 139 Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, xvii Secret Societies, 107 Secret societies/combinations, xv, 31, 40, 72, 75, 107, 109 Segal, Alan, 210 Sentiments Concerning the Coming and Kingdom of Christ, 195 Separate-sphere doctrine, 93 Servetus, Michael, 169 Sethos, 81 Seventeenth degree, 176 Shipps, Jan, 57, 134, 240 Shumites, 208–9 Sillito, John R., 231 Sketches of the History of Literature, 11 Slade, Alexander, 116 Slavery, 206 Sleep as ignorance, 158 Smith, Alvin, 157 Smith, David, 193 Smith, Douglas, xvii Smith, Emma, 90 Smith, Ethan, 195

INDEX

Smith family parchment (as Masonic tracing board), 32–36 Smith, Joseph Jr.: assassination by orthodox Masons/vigilantes, 22, 78, 182; as aural-oral learner, possibly dyslexic or visually dysfunctional, 27–30, 32; biblical-literalist defense of slavery, 205–6; on Cain and Lamanite curse, 207–9; cane of, 47, 48fig.; on economic policy, 229; eschatological views, 191; family practice of magic, 46; gravitating to arcane and heretical, 134; growing ego, xv-xvi; hopes and purpose in design of Mormonism, xxii, 22; as “imposter,” 52; on Jews and God’s covenant, 197–98; in juvenile debating society, 64; lament over being misinterpreted, 170; limp, 51; as Mason, xv, 17, 22, 45–55; Masonry, attempting revitalization of, 51; Masonry, hidden Templar agenda, 50; Masonry, power from on high, 66; Masonry, timing of borrowing from, xiv; as Mormon Knight, 242fig.; as natural leader, 31; presidential campaign, 243; promoted three degrees, 46; psychotherapists’ and reductionists’ analysis, 27; as “robber,” 50; use of secrecy, 240; venting frustration, 78; writing skills, 25, 27; see also Book of Mormon; Economic practices and theory in Mormonism; First Vision; Revelations to Smith Smith, Joseph Sr., 47, 67–69 Smith, Lucy Mack, 46, 68, 239 Smith, Timothy, 193 Smithy, Samuel Stanhope, 217 Solomon’s Temple, 2 Spaulding, Joshua, 195 Spaulding, Solomon, 85, 86 Spirit of Freemasonry, 14 Stayer, James M., 228 Steed, Thomas, 155

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Stenhouse, Fanny, xix, 79, 96–97 Stenhouse, T. B. H., 239 Sterry, Peter, 162 Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, 237 Stone worship/symbolism, 108, 114 Stowell, Josiah, 52 Studies of the Book of Mormon, 209 Sturlaugson, Mary Frances, 223 Sun, moon, and stars, 59 Supper, fraternal, 176 Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, 82 Symbolic Plate of Adoptive Masonry, fig., 150 Swedenborgianism, 158–59, 162–66 Sword, symbolism of, 116, 119–20 Tannehill, Wilkins, 11 Taylor, John, 194 Taylor, Nathaniel W., 140 Teancum, 90 Tell It All: The Tyranny of Mormonism, xix, 79 Temple marriage, 203–4, 220, 221 Ten lost tribes. See Lost Tribes Tent, symbolism of, 113–14 Terrasson, Jean, 81 Thomas, Mark, 168 Thompson, Charles B., 221 3 Nephi, Book of: as apology for Christian Masonry, 128; appearance of resurrected Christ, 127; intending to mend rift among groups of Masons, 128; Knights of Malta reflected in, 131–33; supporting Christian Masonry, 128–34; turning from Masonry toward Christianity, 127–28, 131–32 Thuggee, 74 Tiler, 116, 119–20 Tithing, 230 Torah, 114, 115 Towards a Christian Republic, 168

Tower of Babel, 105, 219–20 Town, Salem, 13 Tracing board, Masonic, 34 Transubstantiation, 169 Tree of Life, 68, 71, 94, 163 Trials of Life, 69fig., 69 Trinitarianism, 168, 181 Trinity, The (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), nature of, 168, 172, 177, 178–79, 181 The True Christian Religion, 166 Tubal-Cain, 73–74 Tucker, Pomeroy, 239 Turner, Orasmus, 239 Tuveson, Ernest Lee, 193 Twenty-eighth degree, 178 Twenty-fifth degree, 176 Twenty-sixth (Trinitarian) degree, 176 Understanding Cults and New Religions, 169 Underwood, Grant, 154, 161, 193–94 Unitarians, 140 Universalism in America, 147 Universalism/Universalists: attraction of Mormonism, 154; concepts of death, salvation, heaven, and hell, 159, 161– 62; influence on Campbell, 143; Masonry and, 15–16; Nephi and mystical predilections of De Benneville, 147; resembling Mormonism, 144, 157; Swedenborgian influence, 162; versus Trinitarians, 168 Urim and Thummin, 26, 27, 32–33 Van Der Donckt, C., 168 Vogel, Dan, 170, 209 Voros Jr., J. Frederick, 174 Les Voyages de Cyrus, 81 Waite, Arthur Edward, 71, 74, 148, 149, 158 Walker, D. P., 161

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Walters, Wesley P., 101 Wand/rod/cane/pedum, 46–47, 48fig., 69, 70 Ward, Lester, 225 Ware, William, 85 Washington, George, 8–9, 10fig., 10–11 Webb, Thomas Smith, xx-xxi, 19, 20fig., 64; on construction of walls of Jerusalem, 118; on Darius, 117–18; on role of Bible in Masonry, 102; selling apocalyptic works, 195; on symbolism of beehive and ark in Masonry, 108 Wesley, John, 164 Westminster Confession of Faith, 141, 160–61 Whiskey Rebellion, 189 Whiston, William, 161–62 White, Jeremiah, 162 White, O. Kendall, 168 White stone worship/symbolism, 108, 114 Whitmer, John, 91 Wight, Lyman, 221 Wilcox, Linda P., 173 Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, 86 Willers, Diedrich, 204–5 Wilson, Colin, 162 Winn, Kenneth, 240–41 Women: appeal of early Mormonism to, xviii; blood oaths, xviii, 96, 244, 246; Book of Mormon as literary means of disentanglement from female moral dominance, 87–88; Book of Mormon as subversive radical feminist statement, 91; exclusion from Masonry, 92–93; facing patriarchal absolutism,

INDEX

180–81; feminism and Evangelicalism, xvii; inclusion in continental Masonry, xvii; inclusion in Masonic ceremonies, xviii, 72, 88, 91, 244; as Lucifer’s angels, 175; mention in Book of Mormon, 90– 91; message to, in Mormon concept of God, 179; in moral coalition with fathers, 89; ordination of, 220; ordination of males only, 151; paucity of female role models in Book of Mormon, 89–91; presumed equal to symbolic carnage of temple and polygamous cohabitation, 246; roles in emerging industrial nation-state, 89; separate-sphere doctrine, 93; see also Polygamy Wood, Gordon, xvi, 240 Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia, xvii Young, Brigham: on compatibility of Book of Mormon and Bible, 135; contravening adoptive spirit of Book of Mormon, 223; God and non-Virgin Mary, 172; on Jesus, 169; racist policies of, 221; reinstatement of Law of Consecration and Stewardship, 230; on salvation of Jews, 200; value of estate at death, 228 Young Nephi Subdues His Rebellious Brothers, 110fig. Zeniff, 208, 212 Zion in America, 199 Zion’s Camp, 47 Zoram, 117